Last year, while we were onboarding a new social media management client, they asked us to set up a custom-styled and integrated Linktree for their Instagram bio. Linktree, in case you don’t know, allows users to create a personalized and customizable mobile landing page that houses all the important links that they want to share with their audience. It’s essentially a third-party, link-in-bio solution that can be used on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. There are quite a few Linktree alternatives out there as well, and like the first-to-market, they’re all fairly limited mobile splash pages that live outside of the social user’s own website. While setting up and styling our new client’s custom Linktree, we realized that for the time we were billing for the setup/customization and the drawbacks and limitations of the tool itself, we could do better. We could stop using Linktree altogether.
Enter /launchpad. It’s not a brand, plugin, or third-party product of any kind. It’s simply what we’re calling our own mobile, social-centric, and fully customizable link-in-bio solution that lives on many of our clients’ own websites; an extension of their own domain. You can check Nuera’s out on our Instagram bio and see a few visual examples below. We use /launchpad for all the same things anyone might use a Linktree for, but aside from being fully customizable and without limitations, it comes with a few added benefits.
Keep Your Traffic
The first and most obvious benefit is that with an on-site launchpad when any user clicks the link in your bio, they’re seeing a fully customized “link tree” but they’re viewing it on your website. That means instead of sending traffic to a third party, you’re keeping it for yourself. Why on earth would you pay (or not, if you’re using a free version) to give valuable social referral traffic from trusted domains away to a third party? You shouldn’t.
Reduce Your Bounce Rate
We’ve established that when a user clicks the link in your bio and pulls up your new on-site “link tree,” they’re landing on your website vs. a third party. Now consider this: the moment they find the link they’re looking for and click, BOOM, they’ve just visited a second page on your website. This means that most of your social referral traffic will now help contribute to a reduced bounce rate. A bounce rate is calculated when someone visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving (no click to another page, no form submitted, etc.). Google doesn’t like that. They like to see that users are finding what they’re searching for when they visit your site and the faster they find it, the better! As a rule of thumb, a 26 to 40 percent bounce rate is considered excellent and a 41 to 55 percent bounce rate is average. Since we began using /launchpad in clients’ social media bios, we’ve seen bounce rates decrease as much as 32%!
Control Your Brand
The free versions of third-party tools like Linktree come with minimal access to analytics, third-party logos on your landing page, and on platforms like Instagram, are often considered spam links. Like most third-party tools, they could also go down or go away altogether at any time, leaving you with dead links in your all-important social media bios until someone on your team figures it out or (gasp!) one of your followers notifies you. When you build your own on-site solution, it’s yours forever, it’s fully customizable with no third-party logos, and you’re not at the mercy of someone else’s server uptime.
Our /launchpad solution is now free for all social media management clients of Nuera Marketing who host and manage their websites with us. We build it, style it, integrate it, and maintain it all as a free service. Why? Because it helps us achieve our clients’ marketing goals and that’s our top priority. But whether you’re working with Nuera or not, I’d recommend working with your marketing team to stop using Linktree and build out your own link-in-bio solution. Need help? We’re happy to offer you /launchpad as a small, standalone web project for a reasonable, one-time fee–just say hello.
About the Author
Joe Sampson
As president and co-founder, Joe is responsible for the development, execution, and success of client and company initiatives. With >20 years of brand and leadership experience, nothing puts a smile on his face like helping clients outperform their goals.
Got questions? Good! Email joe@nueramarketing.com for answers.
