Yourls, our in-house URL Shortener

So, we are already using Bitly.Pro for a custom domain name and to monitor the stats from our tweets and some radio adverting and it works fantastically well! But, we had a proposition from our ISD department about the use of an in-house solution as well.

Now, we always like to do things in-house if we can and this seemed like an ideal solution, the same functionality as Bitly.Pro with the added extras of being able to update the destination of the URL's, update the short link ending and far better filtering of results and lists.

So, we're going to use them for publication in printed materials, much friendlier than using the long URL and we can use a custom address to ensure that it stays looking corporate. The best part will be that we can get some feedback on how closely people using the printed prospectus interact with the website. Throw in a few trackable phone numbers and we'll be looking at pulling in the most stats we've ever had on a printed publication!

bitly.pro here we come...

I finally received an email from bitly.pro (beta) this morning about our account being created, all very exciting stuff!

So, all social media links can now be shortened to uob.im, for example a link to our facebook page can be:

http://uob.im/ayDp2R

Genius stuff, nicely on brand but not too heavy handed and means we can get some feedback on link traffic from a central account. I just need to nominate a member of the team to handle the short url requests!

Ideally we would like an in-house URL shortening service but due to the timeframe for this to be implemented we have looked at an external alternative for the time being. We can always move over to the in-house option once it's up and running with an alternative domain name and then phase out the uob.im links. A bit of a pain but at least we can use the services now!

Yet another external product to enhance our offerings in Marketing, anyone else have 'timeframe' issues with development work?