I am friends with many business owners and I follow them across social media channels. I see mistakes, and this one is about clicking a link in your bio. One of my friends is a premium, high-end email writer. She is an expert at increasing conversion rates through email. She charges a significant premium for it because it’s a needed service. 

The other day, I saw a post from her on Instagram highlighting a blog post she had written. In the caption, she wrote, “Here are three mistakes that I see people make when they put images in their emails.” But, then, the last line wasn’t the three mistakes. It wasn’t even one of the mistakes. She simply said, “Click the link in my bio to find out more.”

The Wrong Metric

This is a common thing to see on Instagram, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good tactic. Asking your social media followers to click a link in your bio is often used to get people to click over to your blog so you can increase your page views. The problem with doing this, though, is that you are measuring and valuing the wrong metric. 

If you aren’t clear on what your goal is for social media, then you can get distracted by what I call “blogger problems.” This is where you think pageviews are the answer for growing your business. You begin to believe that if you increase pageviews, you will also increase conversions. 

That might be true, but it isn’t always the case. This is tricky on Instagram anyway because you have to make sure the link in your bio changes when your post changes, making scheduling hard. Not to mention that some people are never going to take the time to click on your link and read through your blog post.

What Is Social Media Really For?

We need to remember that what social media is for is to amplify your authority. It’s not to get pageviews. You want to make sure that the people who are following you know that you know what you’re talking about. 

So rather than going to the trouble of trying to get those page views by asking people to click a link in your bio, you should instead post one, or even all three, of the mistakes in the Instagram caption. 

When you approach Instagram with the mindset of a subject matter expert, you’re setting yourself up to highlight your client’s successes, talk about your methods and methodology, and pull straight from the blog posts you’ve written. As a result, you don’t have to recreate a new caption or content every time you want to post on social. Instead, you can re-purpose what you’ve already created, saving yourself time and showing your followers that you are an expert.

Think about what you want people to do. Do you really want those clicks? Is your platform monetized for ads? Typically it isn’t if you’re a service provider.

Stand In Your Authority 

What you want people to do more than just clicking on the link in your bio is to say, “That was a really interesting fact!” When you teach them something on your social media, you create an association in their minds that you are the expert on that topic. Then, when they are going about their regular lives and encounter that topic again, they will think about you. They will know that you are a wealth of information that they can use to transform their life or business. 

Don’t lose the opportunity to be an expert. Remember what social media is for. Let the search engines be the thing that drives clicks. Let social media be the thing that amplifies you.

Doing Marketing Differently

Our Doing Marketing Differently System is beneficial in this area. We show you how you can say something once on video and have it work for you 27 times. This gives you a 27 times return on investment and 27 opportunities to show off your expertise.