Social media is a great place for promotions. Whether you have a show coming up and you want people to buy tickets or you’re selling a new product, most brands on social media have something to promote. Social media can spread the word, but to reach your goals, you’re likely going to need to direct your audience elsewhere. This is where links come in. Buffer’s podcast The Science of Social Media discusses this topic in their episode “Why you shouldn’t add links to your social posts.” This might sound like a confusing title to some. If the point of using your socials is to direct your audience elsewhere, then why shouldn’t you use links?

The Problem with Links

The Buffer podcast explains through their research why you shouldn’t include links in social posts. The platforms they researched all showed less engagement and reach on posts that included links versus ones that did not. Based on my own experience with social media, I think this is a no-brainer. On a platform like Instagram, for example, links don’t even work when included in a post, they show up as normal text. Whenever I’ve come across this I’m instantly turned off because it says to me that this brand doesn’t know what they’re doing. Even when links do work, I think that they tend to look odd in the small space allotted for captions on most platforms. In the past when I’ve been required to include a link with a post, I always at least use a shortened one. I also think nowadays a lot of us are hesitant to click links online because we’re aware of links often being scams. The Buffer podcast also mentions that the social platforms themselves don’t want to push posts with links because they want users to stay on their app and not go elsewhere.

The Solution

How can you share a link on social media if all of the research says not to? I have always found that using the “link in bio” trick is the way to go. This is when you put the link directly into the link section of your social page’s biography. Many link platforms allow you to showcase multiple links on one page, so you only need to put one in your biography and it will lead to them all. The Buffer podcast’s research affirms that this is the best option. Their research showed that social posts that used “link in bio” instead of an actual link always performed better. I think this is because the social media platforms prefer this. After all, there is an extra step involved in getting to the link. Not everyone cares enough to go to someone’s page and look for a link, especially when it is often included on a page with other links. Additionally, users will feel more confident that the link is legit when it’s from your page and not just a post that could’ve been from a fake account. On Instagram and Facebook, I like using links in stories as well as the bio because it’s the fastest way to get to another page from these platforms. Users can easily click on a page’s story when viewing their post and they don’t have to sort through a page full of links. In conclusion, you can and should use social media to link to other things, but it’s important to be strategic about it.