LinkedIn doesn’t want your external links

Note: this week’s installment was a team effort with Kaïa, my social media manager at Upswept Creative, who also shares my penchant for experimentation.😉

When I read that LinkedIn’s algorithm tends to de-prioritize posts that contain external links, I wasn’t surprised, since this is how Meta's algorithm operates as well. I was a bit annoyed, though, to have yet another social media platform that requires a silly song and dance just to share an external link. 

Still, in the interest of investigating, I made this change for one of our clients, and started sharing external links in the comment section instead. Then, I included a call-to-action in the post description, to send folks to the comments to get the link.

Was this a good idea? Maybe, maybe not.

Does a link in the comments really help with LinkedIn engagement?

I was skeptical that this change would be a positive one. To me, it felt like it would just be another barrier to getting folks to click a link they may only be mildly interested in anyway. Would this practice really increase engagement?

After two months of including links in the comments, rather than the post description, here’s what happened:

1. Our client's engagement rate actually went up! 
2. Their link clicks remained stable and/or decreased slightly – no significant change was seen, though. 

There are other variables that could account for higher engagement, however. Engagement could have gone up due to an unusually popular post, for example. So, I gave it more time.

Another two months passed, and our client's engagement rate continued to increase! …but link clicks continued to slowly fall.

What does engagement on LinkedIn get you?

When you have a healthy engagement rate on any social platform – which can often be as low as 2-5%, depending on the size of your audience – this typically gains you visibility. When a post gets more engagement, the algorithm is more likely to show it to a wider audience. 

Don't get too caught up in on-platform metrics, though: above all, being active on social media platforms should feed our goals!… which almost always means getting your audience to leave the social platform, by clicking on one of your links. 

In other words, if your link clickthrough rate is dropping, that means fewer people are clicking through to actually buy from you.

Where should we put our links on LinkedIn? It depends.

If you want to drive folks towards your website, your email list, your webinar, you might as well put that link in the main text of your post. If someone has to make an extra click to access your link, they're simply less likely to do it.

Best practices for websites support that, too: one of the guiding principles in website strategy is to make the most sought-after items accessible with as few clicks as possible. This doesn’t mean dumping everything on the homepage… but it does mean removing unnecessary steps. So, when you’re on LinkedIn, you’ll want to remove that unnecessary step, too.

If you're specifically looking to reach new people, however, you may want to keep links out of the main text of your post, and go for that higher engagement rate. If you have a well-rounded social media strategy, you'll be doing a bit of both: some posts will be designed for audience growth, and others will be intended to get those clickthroughs.

In short: if you want someone to click on a thing, make it as easy as possible for them to do so.