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).

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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

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Transcript

This is a video about the LinkedIn feed algorithm and how it treats links in comments. We’ve started to see things like this post. This is from Rebekah Bastian, a friend of mine here in Seattle. 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 want to 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’s 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.

1. The implied link

For example, this 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: you’re talking about the thing you expect people who are interested to go and actually, you know, maybe they clicked on Alert Mouse or they searched for it in Google or whatever. Then they got to us. Great, fine. Obviously it’s showing me the admin stuff instead of an actual link.

2. A “hidden” link in comments

The other way to do it is to actually include a link in comments, but not necessarily say so. This was a post I put up, maybe at the beginning of the year, and it also did very well here on LinkedIn. 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 does Rand mean when he says that? That creates curiosity, which inspires me to want to go search it out.

Rather than saying “link in comments” and then just including the link as the comment, I write something pithy that’s going to get engagement, that’s going to get twenty‑seven likes and celebrations and a bunch of replies as well. 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.

The way we 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. Then we write a comment that makes that engagement engagement‑worthy in and of itself, because we know that will drive LinkedIn to put it at the top of the comments, which means you won’t have the problem you see here.

3. Third‑party comments

The third thing we do, which I won’t necessarily show you an example of, is that Amanda will put the comment in my post and 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. I sometimes do this for friends when I see that there’s a “link in comment” request—I’ll go into their post and leave the comment for them.

You’ll see Amanda sometimes post something and then I’ll say, “Hey, I think you forgot this link,” and I’ll put it in there. Those types of higher‑engagement, outsider comments 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, these are some solutions. I expect LinkedIn will catch up with all of these, and we’ll 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, Threads, or even Twitter (although most of the engagement there is bots now). It’s 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 engage positively, your odds of getting that comment at the top are much higher. This practice is universal and it’s important for social‑media marketing if you’re still trying to get visitors to your site.