Short links in Telegram actually get clicked
A friend sent a four-line Google Drive link into a group chat. Three people asked if it was a virus. That's the whole post.
My friend Daria runs this tiny bakery — like, one oven, orders through Instagram DMs. Last Tuesday she wanted to drop the weekly menu PDF into a Telegram group with maybe 38 people in it. Normal thing, she's done it before with photos.
Except this time she pasted the Google Drive link and on everyone's phone it wrapped across four lines. You know how that looks. Within two minutes someone typed "???" and another person wrote "virus no click" and I swear a third person sent the skull emoji.
The PDF was fine. It was just a menu. Croissants, prices, nothing weird.
She called me annoyed, which is fair, because I told her to use a short link months ago and she didn't bother until the group roasted her. We shortened it to something like myurl.su/menu-pdf in maybe fifteen seconds on my laptop while she was still complaining. She reposted. Same file. One line. People opened it. Crisis over.
I don't think short links magically increase sales or whatever marketers promise in webinars. In Telegram the preview just looks less like a phishing attempt, and honestly that's enough when your audience is aunties and neighbors who've been burned by scam links before.
Channels feel different from groups, by the way. If you run a channel and you mention the link in a voice note, a readable slug actually helps — myurl.su/spring-menu is easier to repeat than seven random characters. In a busy group the link disappears in scroll anyway unless someone pins it, so I wouldn't obsess over the slug there. Pick something you can type from memory if you're gonna say it out loud.
About UTMs: keep them on the destination URL if you need analytics. Nobody in the chat should have to read utm_source=telegram in 2026. Build the tagged URL, shorten the whole thing, post the short version. Your spreadsheet still gets the data.
Before I post anything with a link in Telegram I open it on my own phone once. Telegram's in-app browser chokes on some checkout pages and you won't know until someone screenshots an error. Also if it's a download, say "PDF inside" in the caption because the short link hides the extension and people get nervous.
You don't need a custom domain for a group chat — myurl.su is enough. You can connect your own domain later if you want branded short links.