By Those pesky, anti-link, pro-native-content social platforms are at it again, muzzling the visibility of links anywhere and everywhere they can. Sure, they occasionally let something especially high-performing through, but as we learned when Twitter open-sourced its algo, these systems intentionally and consistently demote content with links… But… Amanda and I have been working on ways to outsmart these systems for years, and it’s time we let you in on our current process (which has gone quite well the past 12 months).
2015 Marketer: <puts links on social to send traffic back to their site>
2016 Algos: degrades the visibility of posts with links
2020 Marketer: <puts links in the comment/reply to the post>
2021 Algos: degrades the visibility of comments with links
2026 Marketer: <Does this 👇> at least, I hope you are
Transcript
This is a video about the LinkedIn feed algorithm and how it treats link in comments. We’ve started to see things like this post. This is from Rebekah Bastian, a friend of mine here in Seattle. And she put up this post on LinkedIn yesterday, Friday.
You can see that she’s got the phrase linking comments there to help enhance engagement, right? Because she knows that the LinkedIn feed tends to demote posts that include a link and so she puts it down here in the comments. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, but I wanna point out that what we have seen time and again is LinkedIn doing this. This is a screenshot from the first time I saw this post, which was in my mobile feed, right?
As I’m scrolling through my phone, the LinkedIn app, I see it this way. You can see LinkedIn comments, but then they don’t show the comment. I would have to click show all comments or add my own comment and then scroll through. What we’ve seen is time and again, LinkedIn is doing this.
They’re basically hiding the link that’s in the comments. They do this on desktop as well. It’s extremely annoying. It makes very frustrating to try and find that link.
And this is intentional because LinkedIn wants to keep you on LinkedIn, not going to Rebecca’s Substack or your blog. So how do you get over this problem?
Well, Amanda and I have been experimenting with a bunch of stuff and what we have seen is that two things work really well. One is the implied link. So this for example, is a video post that I put up last week. It did very well on LinkedIn, got a ton of engagement, tons of people watching it.
It does not contain a link. The comments also do not contain a link. Did I hope or expect that maybe somebody would link to Alert Mouse or Seattle Ultrasonics in the comments? Yeah, sometimes.
Sometimes I’ll wait for someone to do that and then boost their comment. But in this case, what happened was we could see in, our traffic to Alert Mouse that in fact, lots of people who watched the video did indeed come. They came to Alert Mouse, they set up their own alerts. That’s success for this video, right?
That means that this video worked and that’s great. So this is the implied link model. Essentially, you’re talking about the thing you expect people who are interested to go and actually, you know, maybe they clicked on alert mouse and then or they searched for it in Google or whatever it is. Right?
And so then then they got to us. Great, fine. Obviously it’s showing me the admin stuff instead of an actual link.
But the other way to do it is to actually include a link in comments, but not necessarily say so. So this was a post that I put up, maybe at the beginning of the year and it also did very well here on LinkedIn. And what I did was try to basically summarize the piece so that you can get an encapsulation of the article, but it creates curiosity to get more. For example, number three here, vibes not facts rule sentiment and dictate perception.
What what does Rand mean when he says that? Oh, that creates curiosity, which inspires me to want to go search it out. And then we do this. So rather than saying link in comments and then just including the link as the comment, I try and write something pithy that’s going to get engagement, that’s going to get twenty seven likes and ‘s and celebrations and a bunch of replies as well.
And you can see that this got a fifth of the engagement that the actual post got. So I know that that comment thread is reaching a significant percentage of the people who are seeing this. And the way we did this, right? The way we do this all the time, Amanda and I do this over and over is we’ll write something that suggests there’s gonna be more in the comments, but doesn’t make it explicit.
And then we write a comment that makes that engagement. That is engagement worthy in and of itself, because we know that that will drive LinkedIn to put it at the top of the comments, which means you won’t have this problem that you see here.
The third thing that we do, which I won’t necessarily show you an example, but the third thing we do is this, which is Amanda will put the comment in my post. I’ll put the comment in hers when Spark Toro posts something, one of us will use our own personal account to leave the comment. It’s essentially a third party leaving the comment rather than us. And I try and do this sometimes for friends when I see that there’s like, hey, link and comment or whatever, I’ll go into your post and I will try and leave the comment for you, that kind of thing.
You’ll see Amanda sometimes post something and then I’ll say, hey, I think you forgot this link and then I’ll put it in there. Those types of higher engagement from outsiders don’t just follow the link in comments model and they tend to do better for us. So if you’re trying to solve this problem, this link in comments problem, these are some solutions. I expect LinkedIn will catch up with all of these, with this, with this, right?
And we’ll start to have to do even more differentiated things in the future.
That’s just the way this goes. By the way, the same principle is true whether we’re talking about LinkedIn or threads or even Twitter, although I think most of the engagement there is bots now. Also true in other places, for example, Reddit. If you can get a comment in Reddit that includes an external link and then lots of people are gonna engage with that positively and not download it, your odds of getting this type of right at the top, comment is much higher. So this this practice is universal and it’s important for social media marketing if you’re still trying to get visitors to your site.