Today is somewhat of a history lesson.
It’s long been known that social media platforms prefer to keep users on their platform. If they start sending viewers to links off their site, they may not get them back for a while. And that’s not what they want at all.
Just like with website analytics, “time on site” matters and all of the social platforms prefer to have all that time on their site – not, necessarily, yours. This is why videos get optimized on social. If you stop to watch a video you’re likely going to stay on that page a bit longer than you would if you saw a pretty picture or read a funny quote and scrolled on by. This is why we push video content with our clients consistently – whether we are shooting their footage, or they are making selfie videos and sending us, videos are still the best tactic in the business.
Of course, as business owners, our clients want to use social to drive traffic to their website. Whether to fill out a lead-generation form or read a blogpost or get the details on a special, the website is always home base. Social is meant to be a support to the rest of the business. Reminder: a social media page is not enough to represent your business. Your website is #1 in the list of importance.
So, for many years we found workarounds to get people to go from a social platform to a company’s website. The toughest one to manage? By far.. Instagram. For a long time there was no way to send people from Instagram to your website. Links do not hyperlink in a caption or comment so what would be the purpose of putting them there? Also, that’s really ugly. Don’t do that.
Instagram then added a place to put a link in your bio and over time services like Linktree came around so you could use one link to lead to many links whether blogposts, sign-up forms, specials pages. And how did we lead people there? Simple, we’d use the term “link in bio.”
And now? Nowwww…. if the fairies behind the algorithm catch you using “link in bio” in your caption, they will likely shorten the reach and lessen the amount of people able to see that piece of content, and it could penalize your account for a few days to come.
So, now we’re back to the old “just don’t mention it.” Next week I’m going to talk about repurposing content and this all ties in. What’s important is that you get the message out multiple ways, but that you don’t actually give the call-to-action to “leave Instagram and go to this other website.”
One thing you CAN do is put the content into your Instagram story and use the Instagram “link” tool. That’s still okay to do, thought I wouldn’t overdo it.
So we are back to questioning analytics these days. While we can direct traffic from LinkedIn or Facebook on Google Analytics, we can’t necessarily see traffic from Instagram. There’s more of a cause-and-effect reasonable conclusion based on social content and web traffic, which can make proving ROI continually challenging. But… onward we go.
Are there other words you’re finding the same challenge with? Let me know! We can all stand to keep learning a thing or two!
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