Life: Designed

“Click the link below” 

“Link in Bio”

“Product is linked on TikTok Shop” 

We’re used to seeing links on social media. It’s commonplace now, but have you stopped to wonder if that’s what we should be doing? 

The Science of Social Media podcast says no. According to their research, which analyzed over 714 million tweets, including links in posts, harms visibility. Tweets with links had 28% less reach and 7.2% less retweets. It was found that “the engagement rate for LinkedIn posts without a link is 70% higher.”

Please note that this study focuses on Twitter/X and LinkedIn data in 2022.

Largely, though, it’s a good rule of thumb to keep links out of your post. 

Why do Links Hurt Your Content?

Links hurting performance doesn’t make sense at first. Then you realize social media’s main goal is to get you to spend as much time on it as possible. 

Johann Hari, author of the book Stolen Focus, says “the programs that run on [our phones] were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention.” Links in posts conflict with this goal. A click means a user is leaving the site. 

Instagram and TikTok discourage outside links. Anything linked in the caption is unclickable. Encouraged links, like TikTok Shop, keep you inside the app instead of redirecting you.

The result? Posts with links aren’t pushed out as much. Users stay on the site longer, and companies make more money. Your post? It doesn’t perform nearly as well.

What to do Instead

If your goal is to drive traffic to something like your website, it’s almost impossible to avoid links. So what should you do if content with links isn’t being pushed? Use a workaround. 

1. Link in Bio

The most common approach is prompting users to click a link in your profile’s bio. The link is put in a secondary location so users can still access it with some extra effort on their end. 

The Science of Social Media explains that “without an actual link in the post,” instead using a phrase like link in bio, “the post achieves maximum visibility and gets more retweets.” The post gets maximum visibility, and users can still access the link. 

With this method, you can easily utilize Linktrees. This site contains a menu of links related to your brand. Users can not only visit their intended destination but also related sites, prompting them to explore. 

2. Link in Comments

Instead of linking directly in your post, try adding it in the comments. Like the link in bio method, you get the engagement of a no-link post while still directing users to click through, this time, with less effort. 

According to an experiment run on LinkedIn by Sprout Social, posts with the link in the comments performed better in terms of engagement and awareness than posts with the link included in the post. On average, posts with links in the comments garnered 3x more impressions (8,136 vs 3,309). As for engagements, “link-in-comments posts had an average of 261 engagements per post, while the link-included posts fell to 141,” making link-in-comment posts the clear winner. 

3. Comment-to-DM Automation 

A newer way to circumvent this issue is comment-to-DM automation. Run through third-party apps like ManyChat, LinkDM, or CreatorFlow, comment-to-DM automation sends a link directly to a user. 

If you’ve seen a call-to-action like “Comment COOKIES for the recipe!” you’re familiar with this strategy. No link is needed; instead, it’s sent directly to those most interested, all while driving more engagement. 

ReplyRush found 85-90% of users opened these DMs, with 40-65% clicking through. Conversely, ads and bio links had a click-through rate of 1-3% and 2-3%, respectively.

Do you usually use links in your posts?