Swedish Radio scraps Twitter-friendly domain

Sveriges Radio (SR), Swedish public service radio, is about to launch a re-branding project with the aim of getting a more consistent image. The company today sometimes uses SR and sometimes Sveriges Radio in communications. A part of the re-branding is to change the domain name from www.sr.se to www.sverigesradio.se.

Obviously there are many aspects in an initiative of this size, but the change of domain doesn’t seem to take into account how the audience today use links on sites like Twitter. If you read my previous post about how the daily Sydsvenskan gets 8 percent of its web traffic from social media, you realize that Twitter is not insignificant. Each of the 140 characters you can use is valuable, so when you add an extra 11 letters to your domain name, you lose a lot of space on Twitter. And if you have such a short URL as sr.se you often don’t need to use those ugly URL shorteners like bit.ly.

Sure, Sveriges Radio is an extremely strong brand and will do very well with or without this change. The old domain will still be active so that visitors can continue to find the content, but I still can’t fully support a move like this in the era of Twitter.

Footnote: see here for the most recent links to sr.se on Twitter.

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