Add Web Links in your Google SMS Text Messages

Google launched SMS channels early this month and so far, this new medium of content distribution has proved quite popular among mobile phone users in India who prefer receiving updates via SMS messages than say email or RSS feeds.

To give you an example, more people are now subscribed to Digital Inspiration via SMS than Google Desktop though the SMS option has been around for less than two weeks only.

There’s however a small issue with Google SMS channels – it just sends the title of the story as an SMS message so there’s no way for SMS subscribers to link that SMS message with the actual article on the web. See this real example:

Add Links in Google SMS Text Messages

If you are facing a similar problem and like to add permalinks in your Google SMS messages, here’s a simple workaround as suggested by Nikhil of MediaNama:

1. Create a free twitter account.

2. Link your main blog feed to this new twitter account via twitterfeed – see sample.

3. Copy the RSS feed address of your twitter account – this can be obtained easily from the HTML source of your twitter page.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="labnol"
      href="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14701458.rss" />

4. Go to your Google SMS channels page and replace the blog feed with the Twitter feed. Done.

Twitterfeed will automatically add a short URL to every post before tweeting and the same will  be broadcasted to all your SMS subscribers.

You may select bit.ly instead of tinyurl.com (from twitterfeed settings) since the former lets you track clicks as well so you have a good idea about stuff that becomes popular with your SMS subscribers.