When you copy and paste long and ugly links into your favorite URL shortener (e.g. bit.ly), and then share them with your audience, you probably don’t think much of it, right? You shorten them to fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit, to make a post or email look nicer. And that’s probably okay for most folks… But for the digital marketers, social media managers, musicians, brand and marketing agencies of the world, the next generation of URL shorteners might be of interest.
Big name brands like Nike (swoo.sh) and Virgin (virg.in) have been using branded links for a while now. However, they’re exhausting a good chunk of their budget to do this. With Rebrandly, users can create and share branded, memorable, and pronounceable short links. Branded shorts links are different than typical URL shorteners because they include your personal or company domain name instead of a generic one, turning any link you share into a promotion for your brand. You can do this from within any of your other apps, from within the Rebrandly app itself, or you can do it directly from your Safari browser.
Of course, you will have to register a custom domain name, but those are easy to find in the $2 to $10 range. Now you might be thinking, “Oh, well that means I’m going to have to setup an account with GoDaddy or some other registrar and maybe this isn’t really worth the hassle…”. But something else Rebrandly has done to make this easy for the bootstrapped startup running in 100 different directions all at once, is become their own domain registrar. This is different, and it makes it a one stop shop.
There are thousands of domains available to choose from which can clearly represent you or your brand. This is due to all of the over 1,000 new domain extensions provided by ICANN, the organization responsible for coordinating and maintaining all domain names. So aside the common .com, .net, or .org, you can select from extensions such as .deal, .link, .click, .xyz, .cool and many more.
Sharing links from another app or your Safari browser is particularly useful when you find some content that you want to share with your audience, without the hassle of having to copy it, go back to your URL shortener app, and paste it to the appropriate field. If you do want to do this with Rebrandly on your iPhone, just setup their extension by going to the Settings tab within the app and go to “Setup Extension.” Or you can tap on the “More” button with the three horizontal dots from your Air Drop.
Launched in October of 2015 at WebSummit, Rebrandly is a powered by a link tracking company called ClickMeter, which can be used for advanced analytics on your branded links. The Rebrandly app just became available on July 5th, 2016. Rebrandly has been featured at StartupGrind Europe 2016, Virgin Media Bussiness VOOM 2016, Codemotion, Amazon Web Services, and others. The team is now working hard to increase the number of integrations to digital marketers’ favorite tools, and will be announcing some big product improvements which make sharing and tracking your links even easier.
As with Rebrandly on the web, the Rebrandly App is free. Simply register your custom domain name directly from the Rebrandly website, and your branded short link is yours to share with as many possible variations to the keyword and destination URL as you wish.
