I recently came across Sniply, a link-shortening tool that differentiates itself from Bitly by allowing you to attach a call-to-action to every link you share. The reason why Sniply is beginning to generate so much noise among marketers is that it allows you to drive additional traffic and conversions to your website from external content you're already linking out to. That's pretty cool right?
If you're currently sharing content through your social channels on a daily basis, you can use Sniply to attach a message to the page you're linking to with a backlink to your website or text entry box to encourage users to signup to your newsletter.
The quickest way to understand the benefits offered by Sniply is by taking a look at The New York Times sample link provided by the company on the homepage of their website. As you can see, The New York Times homepage loads as per normal, but at the top of the page you can see a message that encourages visitors to try out Sniply's product. It's a simple but smart way to get your message in front of an audience that you have otherwise have struggled to reach through other channels.
How Much Does It Cost?
If you want to try out Sniply, the company offers a free basic package that allows you to create an unlimited number of shortened links, 100 conversions per month and one user profile per account. However, if you want to ensure that the branding of the CTAs is consistent with your company website, it's worth upgrading to the PRO Plan which costs $19 a month and allows you to customise the colours of the buttons and banners you use.
Social media teams can come together to collaborate on tagging up links by the ability to have 5 user profiles per account on the PRO Plan. Sniply's intuitive analytics dashboard allows you to easily see all of shortened links have been created, how many clicks they have received, number of conversions generated and the average time on site for each link.
However, you should be aware that Sniply isn't without its limitations. As the tool is dependant on iframe technology to load webpages, occasionally you will encounter sites that have high security settings that will block the use of them. The company states that it does support 99% of all sites on the internet and a warning is displayed when you try to create a shortened link for a non-supported website.
How Can I Use It?
Once you've established a basic understanding of how Sniply works, it will soon become the secret weapon in your social media arsenal. The really cool features of Sniply begin to seem more impressive when you incorporate the tool into your day-to-day digital marketing activities. If you're still lost for ideas about how to use Sniply to drive additional traffic and conversions to your website, I've listed some tactics below that you can use today.
1) Are you currently sharing other people's content through your social media channels? If you're linking out to external websites which are not your own, shorten the links with Sniply and add a CTA to encourage people to subscribe to your company newsletter.
2) Similarly If you're sharing your latest blog post through your social media accounts, you could use Sniply to add a message to the blog post page to recommend the user checks out additional content like a whitepaper, how-to guide, brochure or special offer.
3) Do you have a company newsletter? Shorten the links contained within the email with Sniply and add a message to recommend particular offers you may be trying to push for a marketing campaign.
4) Are you writing guest blogs for other websites? It's still important to gain a relevant contextual link back to your website in the body copy for SEO purposes, but if you're including links to other websites then you could shorten these with Sniply and add a CTA to your website.
5) Think outside of the box by combining Sniply with Buffer. If you're currently scheduling messages within Buffer to be sent at a specific time throughout the day to your social media accounts, why not use Sniply to create a time sensitive message?
If you have any imaginative ways to incorporate Sniply into your day-to-day social media activities then I would love to hear them in the comments section below.