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WordPress Short URL for Twitter

Jan 08, 2010 6,852 Comments

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You may have noticed that Twitter no longer automatically shorten URLs in the tweets. The great thing is now you can promote your own domain in the tweets. If you are using WordPress, you can take advantage of the default permalink structure to shorten URLs. Instead of posting the "pretty" URL, you can shorten it by removing the "www." and using the post ID in the URL (e.g. "?p=1204").

short url example

Advantages of Using Your Own Domain URLs:

  • Promote your site (branding): when people retweet, your domain will fly around.
  • More meaningful: readers at least know the link goes to your site. Shorten URL (e.g. bit.ly/buSzh) is meaningless because readers don’t know where the link is directing to.
  • Build trust & increase click rate: people tend to click on the links that they trust rather than unknown URLs (ie. bit.ly/buSzh might be a spam link).

How to Find Post ID?

  • Go to Admin > Edit Posts, hover over the post link, look at the status bar, the number at the end of the URL is the post ID.
  • When you are editing or previewing a post, the number in the URL (on the adddress bar) is the post ID.