Have Links Have Become Our Enemy?
As an aspiring communications professional, social media has been very crucial and relevant in my professional and personal life. During my undergrad program, I did three social media management internships. I learned a lot of great techniques, found out what works well and what doesn’t, and really learned how to use tone and voice through a caption or video. I am now currently interning at my fourth communications internship, again managing social media once again
Each experience has taught me different skills managing social media such as getting sponsors, brand deals, using hashtags, analyzing statistics, creating Google Stories, and so much more. They were all very different too, I was working for different nonprofits, LLCs, and even a lifestyle influencer. But there was one thing all three had in common, which was sharing links.
Why am I writing about link sharing?
Link sharing is so common on social media. I never even really think twice when I see a link on a post or a redirect saying, “link in bio.” It is a call to action that pretty much any brand, company, or business that has a website, or any kind of online presence off of social media that people need to see or look for.
These social media platforms are getting more and more sneaky about their link sharing avoidance. They want to keep us on their platforms, so you don’t leave it to go online to the shared link. As you may have noticed, Instagram and TikTok purposefully make links “un-clickable” when they are written in a caption, so people have to type it out on their search bars (very inconvenient). Other platforms still let you add a link in your posts, but research has found those posts get LESS engagement. This was baffling news to me.
The Science Social Media Podcast created an episode titled Why you shouldn’t add links to your social posts, and the host shares some statistics that honestly shocked me.
In the research they conducted themselves, they analyzed 174 million tweets some that contained links, some that did not through, a research platform. They also analyzed LinkedIn stats. Here’s what they found:
Tweets with a link got 7.2% fewer retweets
Tweets with a link get 28% less reach
LinkedIn posts with a link included got 3x less impressions
LinkedIn posts with no link got 70% more engagement
Link In Bio Method
Another very common way to get people drive people visit an external website is by including the link to the site in the social media bio. Then, if a certain post is talking about for example, an event sign up link, and they say “check out our link in bio to RSVP” people will have to do so if they want to RSVP to that event.
The people at The Science of Social Media podcast found that tweets that said “link in bio” had 8.98% more retweets that a tweet with a direct link in the tweet, 21.24% more impressions, and 40% more reach. Crazy right?
When I was interning, at one particular place our supervisor knew links did not work on Instagram, yet still wanted us to include them in the captions. When I think back, engagement did seem lower. At my current internship, I actually suggested using the “link in bio” method and using resource called LinkTree so we can have multiple links all in one place to redirect our followers to sign up links, our website, and other forms. We have found this really helps, and because we have all the links we want to share in one place, just adding “find the link in our bio” is so easy and engaging.
So what now?
This podcast has made the argument that if we are not posting links within our social media posts, we will get maximum visibility. I don’t quite know if I agree, only because of the complex algorithms each platform uses. I rarely ever see my friends Instagram posts anymore and links are like 99% never in their captions. The algorithms are strange and have become so advertising heavy that people who use social media as their job such as the influencer I interned for has said she thinks her content “gets lost in the sea of algorithms.”
I found other research articles that say very similar hypothesis and results from Hootsuite and a LinkedIn post article.
These statistics do make sense. Social media platforms want to keep users on there as long as possible doom scrolling and stealing all of our attention. So I do believe the algorithms are against posts with links embedded and or in the caption.
I think moving forward, I will be bringing this up to my internship supervisor, because we use links on the LinkedIn posts I create but use the LinkTree on Instagram. I am very curious to see if we make this change on LinkedIn what the statistics of impressions and even the difference of the likes we will get on the posts. As a social media coordinator, links really do seem to be a enemy, but are they THE enemy for bad engagement? I truly don’t know.
