On A Mission

Before we discuss the merits of embedding links within social media, it is helpful to consider the aim of posting in the first place: to build an ever-increasing community of engaged followers. 

Engagement. That is like inviting your friends over for dinner to eat, drink and talk. No strings attached. The alternative is to invite friends over and then sell them some stuff – jewelry, booze, kitchenware. It seems that social media has moved away from its original intent and there is an increasing amount of commerce as people and organizations use social media for direct marketing. 

During this course, I’ve learned it is better to have fewer followers and more engagement than vice-versa. So, will adding links to your social media help or hurt in that endeavor? Let us start by acknowledging how essential working links are when you want to get to information. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking a link that doesn’t work. Arghhh!

The podcast we listened to this week was the Science of Social Media by Buffer, why you shouldn’t add links to your social posts.

In his experiment, Buffer looked at 174,525,132 tweets published between July 15, 2022 – August 16, 2022, comparing two styles: posts that included a link and posts that didn’t include a link, but instead included a link in the bio. He indicates both samples are statistically significant sample sizes and that the post without the link performed so much better:

• Reaching 40% more users on average than tweets with a link
• Generating 9% more retweets  
• Generating 21.24% more impressions/views 

His net takeaway was then-Twitter favors tweets that use a link in bio instead of a link in the post. (That’s not necessarily the same thing as an experiment that compares posts with a link vs without, where the “constant” is they both have links in their bios.) 

In terms of links in social media, especially Twitter, my takeaway is to use them sparingly and consider alternatives to connecting to those with shared interests, including hashtags. The Buffer podcast helped me to think about links more deeply, but it didn’t prove anything.  

As I said in the beginning, the podcast felt like a sales pitch from Buffer, and I would have been more engaged if it were accurate or if it spent time talking about the value of using Buffer to build landing pages to coordinate with the release of social media.