Extend your brand; Friendly social media URLs

It’s no secret that your social media identities really are an extension of your brand. They’re powerful (often revenue generating) assets that in some cases may generate more traffic than your website. If you’re a company or organization that’s very active in the social media world then it’s probably in your best interest to promote your various social media identities on your company collateral, website, business cards, etc. That said, several of the popular social media platforms have failed in making your content easy for people to access. Sure, twitter.com/webdes03 and facebook.com/webdes03 are simple enough, but I don’t particularly find “http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-greene/5/576/4a5” something that belongs on a business card–and it’s certainly not something people are going to remember.

Luckily there’s a simple way to get yourself a friendly URL to replace that ugly one, and provide a consistent URL pattern to all of your social media identities. If your website is hosted with a company that gives you access to cPanel, Plesk, or one of the other popular hosting management tools, you can simply add a new subdomain and redirect it to the appropriate social media identity. Here’s an example of the process you’d follow to set this up using cPanel.

Login to cPanel and select the “Subdomains” option from the domain menu.

Use the “Create a Subdomain” section at the top of the subdomain management screen to create a new subdomain for your social media identity (ie: Twitter).

From the “Modify a Subdomain” section of the subdomain management screen, select “Manage Redirection” for the subdomain you just created.

Enter the redirection URL, then click “Save”.

That’s all there is to it; now when people go to twitter.mike-greene.com they’ll be redirected to twitter.com/webdes03.

Creating friendly URLs makes it easier to refer users to your various social media identities and gives them a URL they’re much more apt to remember. Here’s a list of the ones I’m using:

• twitter.mike-greene.com

  http://www.twitter.com/webdes03

• flickr.mike-greene.com

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike-greene

• facebook.mike-greene.com

  http://www.facebook.com/webdes03

• linkedin.mike-greene.com

  http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-greene/5/576/4a5

If you’re using a management utility other than cPanel, refer to your documentation or your host for more information. If you’re using a hosted service such as WordPress.com where you don’t have native control over your domain configuration, domain registrars like GoDaddy also allow you to configure subdomains through their tools.