Here is a question that puzzles no social media users. Why do some of my posts get more views than others? Why do some posts get higher reach? Why does some get more engagement? Why does some get better impressions? It's a really difficult question to answer. Which social network has a different algorithm? Each algorithm promotes and demotes posts in their own unique way. Learning why some posts go viral whilst others don't is nigh on impossible.
However, there was one thing that I started to notice with my posts. It seemed that most of the posts with links got less engagement and fewer views. This was just an anecdotal feeling. Nothing more than that, but I wanted to test my hunch, so I've spent the last few months researching. In this episode, I'll walk you through all our research and I'll determine if you should stop using links in your social media posts. Welcome to The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer.
I'm your host, Phil Agnew, and in today's episode, we are going to explore a topic that puzzles most social media users. Why do some of my posts get more views than others? As I mentioned, this is a really difficult question to answer. Each social media algorithm is different and learning exactly how each algorithm works is going to be really, really difficult.
But there was something I tended to notice when I would put a link in my post, and that might be a link to a website, a blog post, a podcast, a piece of content, even links which are really relevant. It seemed like that post tended to perform worse. However, when I removed links, when I just had images or just pure text, those posts tended to get better reach, get more engagement and so on.
I wasn't sure if it was the link that was causing less engagement or if maybe, perhaps the algorithm was downvoting or throttling my post because it contained a link. Now, sort of anecdotally, this seems to make sense. These social networks don't want us to leave. They want to keep users on the platform. So it would make sense that they limit the reach of posts with links that will take you away. But this is just a thought. It's just a feeling. So I decided to do some research.
I conducted a mix of third party and first party research. All of my third party analysis is based on some great research conducted by others, which we have linked to in the show notes. And for the first party research, the research we conducted ourselves, I used brown watch, a consumer intelligence platform. Specifically, I analyzed 174 million tweets, which either contained a link or didn't contain a link.
So we specifically chose to look at tweets because they are publicly available, very easy to get access to. And then we decided to look at tweets that contained a link and then some that didn't. I then looked at the engagement and reach for each of those tweets. So on average, does a tweet with a link get more retweets or less? Does it get more views or less? Does it get more reach or less? And here's what we found. We found that tweets with a link achieve 7.2% fewer retweets than tweets about.
Again, this is on average on a massive data set, but that's a big difference. 7%. We also found that tweets with a link got a 28% less reach. So much, much less reach. Again, we can't be 100% certain if this is down to just tweets with links being simply less engaging for some reason or if they are being sort of limited by the social media algorithms themselves. We've also found that LinkedIn impressions decreased by three times when you post a link.
We found that the engagement rate for LinkedIn posts without a link is 70% higher. And of course, we know that Instagram and TikTok actively discourage link sharing. For TikTok, for example, you can't even have a link in your bio unless you achieve a certain number of followers. We couldn't find any conclusive evidence on other social networks like Facebook or Google business profiles, but we would assume those algorithms act in a similar way.
So the headline appears to be clear, posts on social media that contain a link seem to perform worse. To dig a little deeper, let's dive into our analysis. Thanks to our friends over at BrownWatch, we were able to analyze this huge number of tweets. It was 174,525,132 to be exact. And specifically, we looked at a statistically accurate sample of tweets published between July 15th, 2022 to August 16th, 2022.
And we were looking for links that either contained a link or contained a phrase, which was link in bio. Now the reason we decided to compare the two is because both of these tweets are attempting to do the same thing. They are both trying to drive people to external content. If you put a link, you're trying to drive someone to that link. If you say link in bio, you're trying to do the same thing, but via your link in bio. So via the bio, everyone has a social media profile bio.
And in your bio, you can put a link. And so people who are saying link in bio are basically trying to get people to go to other content, but not putting it in their link, perhaps because they have the same assumption that me that people won't click on a link or that if you put a link in a post, it won't get the engagement it needs. So we compared these two styles of tweets, tweets that contain a link, tweets that contain the phrase link in bio.
We compared the average number of retweets, the number of impressions, the average reach for both types of tweets. I should note here that impressions refers to the sum of all of the followers of the authors who tweeted or retweeted the post. So it's going to be quite a big number and it can be far higher than it. They're actually the number of people of you because you're just summing it up.
While reach is a number assigned to the tweet, which attempts to estimate how many users actually sort of post. So not just adding up all the followers that a person has and whoever retweeted it in their followers as well. Here are the results that we found. Number one, tweets that refer to a link in bio. So tweets that say click my link in bio generate 8.98% more retweets than tweets that include a link.
Tweets that refer to a link in bio generate 21.24% more impressions than tweets with a link. And the link in bio tweets generated 40% more reach than tweets with a link. So saying link in bio rather than including a link appears to improve the engagement you'll get and the views you'll get as well. Why is this? Well one hypothesis is that Twitter and other social networks simply just don't want people to leave the app. So they limit the amount of visibility that link based tweets get.
However, posts that refer to a link in bio seem to circumvent this limitation. Without a natural link in the post, the post achieves maximum visibility and gets more retweets because of it. It's amazing to see the impact that including a link can have on engagement and reach of a post. And it's not just limited to Twitter. So they mentioned earlier, linked in impressions can decrease by three times when posting a link. And the engagement rate for linked in posts without a link is 70% higher.
Now this is a lot to take in. So social media marketers out there, what is the key takeaway from this research? Well, the key takeaway is that if you want to achieve maximum visibility and engagements for your posts, you'll want to avoid using links. But if you want to drive people to external content, you're going to have to put a link somewhere. So it seems like the best way to do it is to add that to your link in bio, which begs the question. What is the best way to set up a link in bio?
How can you build a landing page that is perfect for your social media account? Well, you'll need a customizable tool, which will fit your brand, your need a tool, which is able to store lots of content and your need a tool which can link your audience to the right direction. There are lots of tools to do this. But the one I want to talk about today is Buffer's own start page. Buffer's start page is a very customizable, friendly, easy to use landing page.
However, there is one thing that sets start page apart from the rest. Start page users can schedule new posts to appear on their page at a specific time and date for free. Now, this is unlike pretty much every other link in bio tool on the market, especially the ability to do it for free. And it means you can schedule links, images, texts to go live whenever you would like. You can schedule content for both your social channels and your start page simultaneously in Buffer.
So for example, if you're going to post about a brand new event that you might be running, you can make sure that your link in bio gets that exact same information when the post goes out, meaning you can tell people to click on the link in bio and when they do, they'll see the exact information you need on your link in bio. But there's all sorts of information you can schedule for start page.
You can schedule information about your next event or ticket details about your latest gig, release notes about your last update, discounts for your customers, updates on product production and really anything. Plus, all of your schedule start page updates can of course contain links. So just to recap, using a link in your post will decrease your visibility. You should look to use a link in bio instead. And if you're looking for one to try, why not test out Buffer's start page?
Listeners of this podcast can get started today for free by going to buffer.com forward slash start, that's buffer.com forward slash start, S T A R T. And you can set up your start page in just a couple of minutes and try using a link in bio today. So go to buffer.com forward slash start to get set up for free. All right, everyone, that is all from me today. I really hope you found this episode of the Science of Social Media useful.
And if you enjoyed today's show, please do leave us a review wherever you listened. That really helps the show grow. We love hearing from you, so if you do have any feedback or if you want to ask us any questions, please do reach out to us on social. We're on all the channels you use just search for buffer. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the Science of Social Media. I'm brought to you by Buffer.