Link Shortening for Social Media Marketers

Social media marketing is a tough job, so it doesn’t need to be harder when it comes to proving your performance. The biggest challenge most social marketers face is the ability to effectively track their efforts.

Especially if you are managing tons of channels on a daily basis with multiple campaigns, and hundreds of engagements. How can you possibly stay on top of everything? Or worse, what happens if you can’t prove your worth to your boss or client?

This is where short links, vanity URLs, and branded domains all come in handy. But first, you should understand the basics of UTM tracking and how they relate to link shortening.

What is UTM Tracking?

Although it sounds technical, UTM tracking is fairly easy to understand. The best way to look at it is to start by defining UTM elements and the different parameters you can track. A UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Modules. This is a device to help you easily identify the sources of your traffic.

UTM tracking involves adding unique UTM codes to your URLs to add specificity to reporting. It’s like tagging every effort you make on social media. Knowing the content you posted that leads to the most traffic is critical to maintaining peak performance. It helps you get a better sense of why people are clicking your links.

UTM Parameters

The amount of UTM parameters you set for your URL can be infinite. But keep in mind, the more you use, the harder it becomes to track everything. When it comes to setting your parameters, you want to keep things descriptive yet brief so you can manage them effectively.

In standard UTM tracking, there are three basic parameters required. They are:

• utm_source – This helps track which platform the traffic is coming from like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• utm_medium – This explains the type of traffic, whether it’s organic, referral, paid, etc.
• utm_campaign – This will help you trace the specific campaign that resulted in the traffic surge.

Those are just the requirements. You can add more parameters to further refine your search. The more you add, the more detailed your reports will be. Just know it will take longer to generate and analyze the data. Some other parameters to consider include:

• utm_term – Use this UTM parameter if you want to target a specific keyword for your campaign. This helps to determine how effective each keyword is when driving traffic.
• utm_creative – This comes in useful if you are trying to test the efficacy of two campaigns against each other. It will help you judge how each variation is performing.

URL Shortening and UTM Tracking

So how do these two activities work in conjunction?

The main goal of a social media campaign is to get clicks for the links you share and drive traffic to your business site. That means it’s important to spruce up your URLs to further engage people and entice them to click. Short links are especially important when you have to share long and complex URLs.

UTM links can often be lengthy. The more parameters you add, the longer the link. Eventually, as a social media marketer, you reach a dilemma.

It’s important to track efforts—but is it at the expense of losing clicks? The solution to this problem is shortening your specific UTM links into a branded or short vanity URL.

By creating a short link from a complex UTM, you are marrying the two methods for a powerful marketing strategy.

It’s not enough to create links that you can track; you must get people to click them first. For social media marketers, it is critical to measure the value of the links they share on social channels. Optimizing short links with UTM parameters is the secret sauce to success for SMM.