HubSpot Ideas

Axle

URL Shortener - Ability to write brand names like Jack.org without having them replaced by Hub link.

I have a client Jack.org. Their name is not "Jack".

 

But I can't use their name in social media posts within Hubspot because it gets published with the Hubspot shorted URL instead of their brand name.

 

How about a feature so that if I put square brackets around the name it preserves the name. Even if the link tracking is lost.

 

Thanks!

 

- Axle

 

43 Replies
DoctorMarketing
Member

My company is Doctor.com and yes, it would be useful to be able to choose when links are shortened or which specific links should be shortened in social media. 

bsummerville
Participant

this has been going since 1/17.  Any updates?

RC
Participant

@Axle"How about a feature so that if I put square brackets around the name it preserves the name."

Yes, an escape character that tells the social software to leave this string alone could be very useful. 

jkoenig7
Member

I agree! This would be awesome. I want my people to know to go to my website, and what my site is. If the name could be my site and the tracking still through HubSpot, that would be the stuff of dreams. 

 

IzzyStarted
Member | Platinum Partner

 I agree that we need this function as sooner than later as possible. I am facing this issue with social publishing to other external links, and the team is not the biggest fan of the compulsory hubs.ly version. There are many cases where we would actually much prefer the original URL as is. Is there any way there can be a module in the scheduling tool where we can opt in or out of the shortening feature? 

 

Thanks so much!

ChristianRieck
Contributor | Gold Partner

Have the same with my customers... They prefer more and more to use their URL instead of a hubs.ly link. Please come up with a functionality to enable the link shortener - shouldn´t be that complicated 😉

BigZ
Member

Hey. I have the same oppinion. Shortening links may be cool feature sometimes but sometimes it acctually creates more headache. Option to enable of dissable this would be much appreciated. Thanks

mangoo
Member

I need this feature too! The hubs.ly links are ugly.

LumaBendini
Participant

We work a lot to have good and short URLs for the original contents posted on the website, but it simply has no value when sharing on social media via HS 😞 we need that feature! 

bglick-chainio
Member

This is absolutely preventing us from using the tool as Chain.io

danleininger
Member

Agree, being able to disable url shortening would be great, not having that makes many of our social posts unusable (for our purposes)

ChocolateFilms
Member

Great idea! Would be very useful for posting videos too, as the links now always get shortened which makes you can't see the video (e.g. when sharing a YT video in a Tweet).

ChocolateFilms
Member

Great idea! This would also be very useful when sharing a video (e.g. YouTube video link on Twitter), as currently with all urls being abbreviated the video doesn't show in a post.

staci_NIADA
Member

It would be very helpful to display the actual URL link for viewers to see rather than the shortened HubSpot link!

LukeJarrett
Participant

I would love this to be an optional feature. It seems absurd that I can't share a link to my own website without Hubspot interfering and shortening the URL! I'm already posting a short, friendly URL that users will recognise as part of our website.

AndersAndersen
Member

We fully agree. It's too bad that we can't post our own URL - since our own URL is shorter and less 'spamy' than HubSpots... And i think the Bitly work-around is laugh worthy - no we don't want to buy access to shorter urls, when we spend time and effort into making small urls. And by now the first post in this thread is very old, and HubSpot got no good fix yet...... 

samikaksonen
Member

How many votes is needed that this gets priority? We have a AI company that uses .ai in the official company name. This means we can not post any social posts using Hubspot tools that would mention our company name! Major inconvenience!

 

Please get it done. Pick a special character that can be used before and after the string that one does not want to be a URL link, and we can happily use Hubspot for our social posts in the future. 

panadanny
Participant

Glad I found this as I was going to create my own ticket. We use vanity URLs through bitly and customise them at times. Would love for these customised vanity URLs to be posted as is and not to re-shorten them. 

WillDekrey
HubSpot Product Team

Thank you for providing the feedback and use cases here. We have historically erred on the side of simplicity in how we treat links on social posts. This reduces complexity in our approach to tracking, which in turn means we can be consistent in setting expectations around how social media reporting will work. Introducting flexibility here also means that we introduce irregularity in what we can track and which metrics will and won't be accurate in HubSpot, which could lead to confusion.

 

Given the responses here, we do plan to investigate possible functionality that might alleviate some of the pain you all are feeling around having your company name's and URLs shortened. 

ab-shippin
Member

Yeah I already create my own short vantity URLs with redirects to landingpages with tracking utms. Hubspot is messing with my setup. I have to update all my google analytics channel grouping rules and create new data wearhouse mappings  and google data studio mappings because of the automatic features in hubspot link shortener.  Additionally the hubspot shortinks look awful compared my own branded vanity URLs.
We use a basic redirect plugin in wordpress to quickly create vanity URLs and Redirects with UTMs.
The hubspot auto-UTM feature does not follow the standard naming conventions of Google Analytics.