To Link…or not to Link

Deciding whether or not to include a link in your social media post shouldn’t be complicated…but unfortunately it is. Including a link in your post can be one of the deciding factors as to whether or not your post performs well. 

In Buffer’s Podcast episode “Why you shouldn’t add links to your social posts”, the podcaster explains that he noticed an interesting trend regarding the analytics of his posts. Some of the posts would get more views than the others based on if they included links or not. To test this, Buffer decided to conduct 1st party and 3rd party research and found that posts with links across all platforms (although each in their unique way) provided less engagement and fewer views. The reasoning behind this underperformance is due to social media companies trying their best to keep your attention on their site for as long as possible. I personally believe that it is best practice to not include links in captions or social posts. On social platforms such as Instagram, the company makes the links unclickable if they are included in a caption, hence why there has been an increase of “bio link” companies that were specifically built to combat this problem. 

As the tools for linking on social media expand, there have been companies that have taken advantage of this quirky rule such as LinkTree. LinkTree is a service that helps users develop a single link that can result in a landing page to multiple links. Rather than include just one link on a social media profile, users will create a linktree link and edit that page as much as they’d like to include the specific content that they’d like to share such as a recent news article. 

However, even though this method sounds like a nice loophole, there are some disadvantages to using tools such as LinkTree. According to Mediaalacarte, Linktree doesn’t directly take people to your website which means there would be an extra step for users to access your content. Also, Linktree has limited options in terms of branding which can be a pain point if you can’t find the correct colors for your brand. An alternative that I found might work best is creating your own version of a “link in bio” page on your own website. Allowing for more access for the user and less steps they have to take to get on your website.