Long links eat up valuable space on printed flyers or in Twitter tweets. They’re also hard to remember if someone has to manually enter a URL they see in print or in a caption on a social media outlet like Instagram, which doesn’t allow clickable links.

Avoid both issues by creating custom short links to your Neighborhood Council’s Election assets. There are plenty of URL shortener services such as Tiny.cc, Goo.gl or Bit.ly, to name just a few. In most cases, you simply paste in the original URL you want to shorten, then enter the custom text you want to use instead, to create the shortlink.

Some apps shorten the link to a random series of letters and numbers; others allow you to create a custom name of your choosing, which is better for creating URLs that are easy to remember. For example, you can create a shortlink for your Election homepage using your Neighborhood Council acronym & the year, so that you get something like this: tiny.cc/ABCNCelection16.

TIPS:

It’s a good idea to use something like the year in custom links, to distinguish this season’s election material from next season’s.

Many URL shortening apps will allow you to track how many clicks your link gets, so it’s nice to utilize that feature if it’s available in the app you used.