![]() ![]() ![]() So if a shortlink doesn’t save you any space, why might you want to use it? First of all, let’s look at the pros. You can now see clearly where the 23 characters come from: that’s the exact length of a t.co shortlink. The smaller box in the corner is the actual link that Firefox – or any other browser – actually goes to when you click the link. The larger white box is the full length URL as shown when the cursor hovers over it. In that screenshot you can see a link in a tweet. You can see this on some links if you hover over them. The reason for this is that all links posted on Twitter are, in fact, automatically shortened by Twitter’s native shortlink service. A full length URL, a shortened URL, and a natively shortened URL all take up the same exact 23 characters. Using a link shortener on Twitter does not actually save you any space in your tweets. There are a lot of different shortlink options available, and I’ll discuss them all, but first let’s talk about using them versus not using them.įirst of all, the elephant in the room. One of the go-to solutions for people who don’t know this is to use a URL shortener. Bad: which is 15 characters, takes up the full 23.Good:, which is 58 characters, only takes up 23.If you were to post on Twitter right now, you will find that a link will only take up 23 characters worth of your tweet. Twitter’s initial solution to this problem was simply to recognize a link and count it only as a fixed number of characters. After all, that single URL is 58 characters, over a third of what a normal tweet can contain. But when a site you visit might have a link that looks like “”, you can see how that might cause an issue. There are pros and cons to it, and there’s quite an outcry with the recent announcement of doubling the limit, but that’s tertiary to today’s discussion.Īs part and parcel of using a social network, you naturally want to share links. Twitter’s character limit is one of the defining traits of the site. ![]()
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