Navigating Link Sharing
Hi! My name is Kristin Ardese and I am a professional Graphic Designer and Marketing Strategist. I hope that by sharing some of my expertise, I can help offer valuable insights and build an engaging community.
How many times have you heard the term “check out the link below” or “click the link in bio?” Probably at least a dozen times, right? When it comes to growing your social media platforms, bringing awareness to new content can be vital. Most might think that posting a link on social media would help bring in more viewers. However, what if I told you that recent studies show that most social network algorithms actually reject posts containing links?
The Facts
Twitter:
Yup. Posts on social media that contain a link seem to perform worse than those without a link. Among various platforms, Twitter stands as one where people frequently engage in link sharing. A 2022 study compared 174 million tweets, both with and without links. Researchers found two major discrepancies between tweets containing a link and tweets not containing a link:
Tweets with a link achieve 7.3% fewer retweets than tweets without a link.
Tweets with a link have 28% less reach than tweets without a link.
Although these percentages may seem insignificant, they could still prevent thousands of viewers from seeing your content. Twitter is not the only social network that proves link sharing reduces your audience size. LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram seem to follow a similar pattern in their response to link sharing.
LinkedIn:
Impressions decrease by 3x when posts have a link.
The engagement rate for posts without links is 70% higher than for posts with a link.
TikTok & Instagram:
Actively discourage link sharing
TikTok can’t have a link in your bio unless you have a certain number of followers.
Compromising
So why the huge discrepancy? Why do social media networks make it abundantly clear that they don’t want you to link share? While there is no clear answer, the best guess most analysts have is that Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram simply want to keep you on their platforms. Clicking a link means clicking a one-way ticket out of their app and onto some other digital distraction.
Instagram Link Sharing
Instagram has recently found a way to bypass this issue, while still allowing link sharing. When presented with a link sticker on an Instagram story, a user can now click on it without leaving Instagram. By using a “pop-up” interface, the content of a Google or Safari link can be displayed on the screen, and the user does not have to leave the application at all. When done viewing the content, a user can simply press the “x” button on the top right corner of the popup and return to Instagram immediately. It is unclear if using link stickers in Instagram stories affects the viewership after the pop-up change was made, however, I’m glad Instagram has found a way for creators to share links without viewers leaving the app.
Final Comments
Link sharing is not going away and continues to stay an important part of content creation. I hope that social media networks, such as Instagram, will persist in finding effective compromises that enable users to share links while also maintaining engagement within the app.
