Do Posts with Links Really Get Less Reach? (New LinkedIn Research)
Nathanial Bibby
Grow Your Business Faster with LinkedIn | Australia’s #1 LinkedIn Agency | 2x Best Use of LinkedIn Winner 🏆 Speaker & Trainer
Since I've been posting content on LinkedIn, I've noticed that when I share a link to another website I don't get the same amount of views and engagement.
But is that really a thing?
I assumed that LinkedIn wants to keep users engaged on the platform and therefore wouldn't want people to be sharing links elsewhere.
It made sense to me that they would limit the reach on posts with links in them.
But is that just an assumption, or is it really true I wondered...
I did some digging and found that thankfully another firm had done a research study on this exact topic. Shout out to the legends at Hootsuite.
I'm going to share their findings with you, but just quickly want to add...
As many of you would know, the workaround for not including the link in your caption is to post it in the comments.
This process seemed to not impact my reach, but I couldn't be sure.
Hootsuite did a study where they posted 177 posts with links, compared to only 7 posts without.
The results?
On average, posts without links got 6x more reach than posts with links.
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While linkless posts had fewer shares on average, they received almost 4x more reactions and 18x more comments than the average post with a link.
The only metric where posts with links outperformed those without was shares, but even there, the results were close.
Shares do barely anything for your reach on LinkedIn, so meh, big deal.
The average engagement rate for posts without links was 4.12%, slightly lower than the rate for posts with links at 4.19%.
This is likely due to the fact that posts without links had 6x more impressions.
So, even though average reaction and comment scores were higher for linkless posts, they didn’t quite add up to a winning engagement rate. Largely due to the viral nature of the content no doubt.
Bottom line is this: When it comes to links, chuck 'em in the comments!
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3moI was curious about this, so thanks for clearing that up. Did the study look at engagement when another LinkedIn post or article is linked?
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7moVery informative, thank you ! 😊✨
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8moBarcelona Metropolitan has also done studies in-house and did not see such a material difference. 6x better for posts withOUT links? That is very compelling! Hootesuite is a much larger organization and I would have expected a much more reliable sample size than listed in the article. A sample with 177 posts with links, compared to only 7 posts without is less than impressive. We will advise our team of social media ninjas to use posts with images and insert the links in the comments!
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1yOld but gold.