With only 160 characters, it’s sometimes tough to fit those long URLs into your messages. Popular services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com can help shorten your long web links for you, but did you know that Mobile Commons can do it too?

Mobile Commons takes link shortening to the next level: every phone gets their own unique shortened link.

For example, let’s say you shorten http://www.mobilecommons.com. One person will get a link http://lil.ms/1ex and another will get http://lil.ms/1qo. When clicked, both links automatically redirect to http://www.mobilecommons.com. But now you can tell who clicked since each and every link is unique. And once they’ve clicked, you now know what type of browser and handset they use. If you’ve ever added links to your outgoing email messages and looked at the reports, you already know exactly how this works.

Using Mobile Commons link shortener, you can now add mobile web browsing behavior to your customer database and segment accordingly. Mobile Commons is the only platform that lets you construct profiles based on all mobile behavior, including text messages, phone calls, mobile web browsing, and, for our nonprofit customers, mobile donations.

Getting started with link shortening is easy. Just enclose a URL in double parenthesis when composing any text message, for example “Visit ((http://www.mobilecommons.com)) to learn more” and we take care of the rest!

Extra Tip: Don’t forget the “http://” part. Many phones require that to make the links clickable.