Reader Question: Shortening Your Links on Twitter

Reader Laura asked:

I have sent url links to a friend a couple of times & they have not automatically shortened to tiny URLs so my tweet itself is next to nothing! Is there a setting I need to click or something?

What Laura is referring to is, when you add a link to your tweet, Twitter automatically shortens it, So when you send it, the URL doesn't take up so many characters. They used to use the tinyurl shortening service, but earlier this year switched to bit.ly.

But there are two things you need to know about how Twitter shortens URLs. The first is that it doesn't do it until after you've sent your tweet, which means the long URL is still taking up a lot of characters until then. And since it won't let you actually send your tweet once you've gone over the character limit, it's not really that big a help. (The one way it does help is that, when it does get shortened, it will make it easier for people to retweet your tweets without having to rewrite them.)

The other thing to know is that Twitter only considers a URL to be long if it's 30 characters or more. So even though you might think that a 25-character URL is pretty long, Twitter won't shorten it automatically.

To deal with these limitations, you can either go to one of the URL shortening sites directly and then copy and paste the resulting URL into your tweet. Or you can use a third-party application, like TweetDeck, that has a shortening feature built right into it.

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