Hootsuite, the company responsible for the social media scheduling and management tool, has conducted an experiment on Instagram to find out if posts that include the phrases: «Link and bio» they get more or less visibility from the platform’s algorithm.
Posts with the phrases “link in bio” perform better on Instagram, getting more reach than those that don’t.
The fact that Instagram do not allow to include links in publications it is the protagonist of one of the great debates among social media and digital marketing professionals to date. Despite the fact that it is one of the social networks with the highest engagement, it sends five times less traffic to users’ web pages than Twitter, a platform that has three times fewer active users per month.
Instagram only allows you to place a link in the user’s biography – although there is a trick to put several – so to avoid the impossibility of placing links in the publications, many choose to change the profile link and indicate the change in the publication with the phrase “link in the bio” or “link in the bio”.
This common practice has always raised several questions, including how the Instagram algorithm works with this type of publication. In this sense, some say that publications with this phrase perform worse, since the algorithm reduces their visibility. In theory, this is due to the fact that the platform itself does not allow the use of links, so this could be a way of “bypassing” the rules of the social network.
The doubts arose when the Facebook group of digital experts «Social Media Geekout» He wanted to see how the algorithm treated these types of posts, creating two publications, one of them with the phrase “Link in bio” and the other without it. The result was, in this case, quite clear, since the publication with the phrase obtained much less engagement. The problem with this experiment is that two totally different images were published, with different texts and published at different times, so it was considered that the data could not be conclusive.
The Hootsuite experiment has been conducted using an account with more than 10,000 followers, posting the exact same image, on the same day of the week and at the same time (albeit a week apart). The only difference has been the inclusion of the phrase in one of them. To be sure, the same experiment has been carried out on several images, in order to obtain as much information as possible.
In the following image you can see the images that were published for the experiment:
This time, although the difference was very slight, the professionals at Hootsuite have found that the posts with “link in bio” have worked better. Above all, these publications have obtained a greater reach (“Reach”), so it has been shown that including this phrase in the publications is not detrimental to improve engagement, since the algorithm does not penalize these publications.
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