Social Media for Nonprofits

As part of your social media strategy, you’ll want to copy and post links. These links could lead people to pictures you’ve taken, articles, or videos. But most of these addresses are pretty long. They take up a lot of space on a page plus they make using tools like Twitter difficult because there you’re limited to 140 characters. So you can’t afford to have too many of those characters taken up by a web address.

Enter the world of tiny urls.  A “url” is another way of saying the address of a specific page.  On the web there are several sites where you can take a long web address and have it shortened.  I use the site, www.tinyurl.com although there are many others to choose from.

Here’s an address to one of my video presentations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNdm7xoXLyA&feature=channel_page

Now if I go to www.tinyurl.com and enter that url, this is what I get: http://tinyurl.com/b8hwae

I’ve cut a 63 character url down to 25.  That’s much easier to use in my posts.   The old and new addresses are both now linked so no matter which one you use, you’ll send people to the same place.