Instagram has always been a tricky platform for marketers. Although setting up a Facebook or Instagram Shop helps you pull ecommerce inventory through from your websites database for using for tagging on posts, it relies on a ‘proper data feed’ that has price, stock availability and other criteria In order to succeed. So what do you do if you make custom products or sell a bespoke price it case-by-case service? Not much is the general answer.
For non-ecommerce websites, without investing in advertising spend it is impossible to backlink to your website from posts on your grid. This means that all that content you spend hours creating and curating is literally just eye candy.
This set up has long relied on on the perseverance of your potential customers to be interested enough in your post that they spot – sometimes by happy accident on their timelines – to want to take enough time to click through to your profile and find that ‘link in bio’. As we all know, that amount of effort can be too much effort for a lot of people on social media.
The whole ‘link in bio’ call to action is also predicated on the fact that you have just one thing to say. Some brands change their bio links regularly in line with their major campaigns, but what if you have more than one thing at a time to talk about?
The only other non-paid-for way of getting links from your content to your website is to chase the holy grail of getting 10,000 followers. At 10k followers you get the ‘swipe up’ on stories which allows you to add a link to your website from your stories to help people find out more by clicking on through. For a platform that keeps insisting that for our collective mental health that we shouldn’t be playing a numbers game on social, this seems pretty much like a direct reward for playing the numbers game. But that’s a subject for another blog.
But now – just as 2021 is drawing to a close – we have Instagram link stickers! So if you are no way near achieving 10k followers, these link stickers in Stories are here to save the day!
Gradually.
The feature was pre-announced earlier in the summer, with link stickers appearing for small groups in America during August 2021.
In late October 2021 Instagram announced that link stickers would be rolled out to all accounts and we are now seeing them as a standard feature on accounts we manage in November & December 2021.
If you have ever posted Stories on your account, then you will find the link stickers alongside your other stickers (see it in the left most illustration above, where we have circled it). Just click it to be offered the option to insert a web address and you can also choose what you want the link wording to be to make it less cumbersome than a huge link that would look pretty ugly on your post.
If you have never created a Story before, or have never used or explored stickers, then click the plus sign ➕ at the top of your Instagram app where you would usually make a Post and choose Story from the list. Alternatively, if you are sharing a post from your grid to your story, then click the ‘share’ button from a post on your grid to ‘share to your story’. Once you have a grid post or an image on your story, you will be able to access the menu that contains the stickers.
The stickers are accessed via the little smiley face in a square at the top of your screen. You will find the link sticker somewhere near the top of the list, or you can type ‘link’, to find it. Click on it to add it to your story and follow the on-screen prompts to position it where you need it to be.
The million dollar question. We still have everything crossed that links from grid posts will become a feature in the future, though it’s a hope we’ve been hanging onto for a few years now. We can’t tell you how many times Instagram users have asked how to get to the website after interacting with a post, or that tell us that they can’t click through. If savvy users are struggling to find that “link in bio”, or can’t be bothered with the extra few clicks needed, Instagram needs to help reduce this friction to make the online experience smoother for customers.
So we will keep our fingers crossed for now.
We hope that you found this hack useful. Take a look at the other social media help articles we’ve put together:
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