Over time, a brand’s social media accounts start to resemble a cluttered attic. With links all over the place—many of them old or inactive—it’s hard to tell where the clutter ends and the brand begins.
Social media link management is a non-negotiable step in maintaining a brand’s presence. Brands that keep their links organized and consistent can better drive engagement. This is because their consumers know what they’re clicking and how to get there, and brands can also see how consumers engage with their content.
If you’re ready to de-clutter your social media accounts, this article is for you. We’ll share some best practices for social media link management and show you how to simplify the way you manage your social links.
What is social link management?
Social link management refers to how a brand organizes, tracks, and optimizes links across its social media marketing tools. Every link shared should have a similar structure and allow marketers to monitor performance, so they know what’s working and where they might need to shift gears.
Links are the highways that connect the estimated 5.4 billion people using the internet worldwide. But with all the ongoing campaigns and initiatives brands are managing, that highway can eventually become impossible to navigate. You might have links to blog posts, new products, special promotions, and other resources. Without clear organization, traffic will quickly come to a standstill.
It’s a struggle for many marketers to stay ahead of social link management. Some of their biggest hurdles include keeping links organized across social media platforms, maintaining a consistent brand, and accurately tracking link performance.
You could benefit from a link management strategy if these are the challenges you face, too.
Why does social media link management matter for your brand?
Your links are critical business assets. They’re in every customer communication, across every channel customers access from their digital devices. How you optimize those touchpoints and curate the customer experience speaks volumes about your business and brand.
Here are just a few of the reasons social link management is beneficial.
Brand consistency across platforms
Whether you’re posting to LinkedIn or Instagram, customers should recognize your brand. Everything—from your post messaging to the branding elements you include in your post—should feel uniform. This includes your links and how you drive visitors to click the URLs.
Let’s say you publish a post on TikTok. It has the right number of branded hashtags and a shortened link. But then you drop the full, unshortened version of the link into your Instagram post with a string of random hashtags.
Not only is this a poor strategy on a platform like Instagram that discourages links in captions, but it’s also a surefire way to confuse your customers. Develop social media guidelines to ensure a consistent brand experience for customers, regardless of platform.
Existing content creation support
Your social media management team likely has many players. You might have writers and content creators who drive your content strategy, graphic designers who bring the content to life through visuals, and strategists who handle social media advertising.
But these defined roles aren’t the only thing that supports successful social content strategies—you need social link management, too. When brands manage and track the links in their content, they maintain a more cohesive brand message across platforms to achieve their goals. Social team members can also see the actual impact of their content and how it’s driving audience engagement.
User experience and engagement
Few things are more frustrating than searching a brand’s social media profile for a link. Rather than invest the time in searching, many people will give up if they can’t immediately find what they need.
Properly managed social links create a smooth user experience. You can minimize the time your followers spend combing through your accounts, making navigating to their desired content easier.
Consumers are more likely to engage with your content when they don’t have to look as hard. They’re also more likely to convert when they follow your link. The 87% of sellers who say social selling has been effective for their businesses in 2024 would likely agree that user experience is imperative to their success.
There’s also the algorithm to consider. When people click on the links you share in your social media posts, it sends a positive engagement signal to the platform’s algorithm. With higher click-through rates on links, you can boost your post visibility and reach.
Performance and analytics tracking
How do you ensure you aren’t wasting time creating content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience? And how can you tell what your followers and influencers love most?
Tracking social link performance will give you key insights into audience preferences and content effectiveness. You can tell what hits and what flops based on clicks, engagements, and conversions. Then you can use this data to inform your future social media strategy.
For example, posts that generate a higher click-through rate may indicate you’ve stumbled across a topic or post format your followers are particularly drawn to or interested in. On the other hand, if you have a high bounce rate, you might not be delivering the experience audiences expect when they click your link.
Best practices for effective social link management
Ready to clean up your social links so customers have the best experience with your brand? Here are some best practices to amplify your social media presence on every channel.
Organize your links by campaign or platform
Keeping track of links will help preserve everyone’s sanity, especially team members responsible for generating reports on social media posts. To do this, you can create a master spreadsheet with columns for your full URL, shortened link, platform, performance metrics, and publish date. Filtering and sorting options will make it easier to find and analyze links when it’s time to create the report.
With some of the best social media management tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite, link organization is even easier. Using these tools, you can automatically organize, schedule content, and track links across multiple platforms. As soon as you schedule posts, you’ll have visibility on every link from the social media management platform.
Use branded short links
We’ve all seen URLs with long strings of random letters and numbers. Those links often scream spam, discouraging people from clicking them.
Short, branded links give consumers peace of mind. When your brand name is visible in the URL, consumers are more likely to trust that the link is legitimate. They’re less concerned about clicking on unknown or potentially malicious links.
Implement consistent UTM parameters
Ensure you have consistent UTM parameters implemented across your platforms to track campaign performance accurately. Without the right parameters in place, you’ll have difficulty attributing your website traffic and conversions to a specific platform or campaign. This will also make measuring the overall effectiveness of social posts and social campaigns difficult.
Here’s an example: If you’re posting a link to Facebook, you’ll want to track “Facebook” as the source and “social” as the medium. Is the link associated with a unique campaign? You’ll also want to include that campaign as a parameter.
Trackable UTM links help you get the most attribution out of your links.
Regularly audit and update your social links
Like that cluttered attic, you’ll occasionally want to do a deep clean of your social links to free up room for new ones. Some companies conduct a comprehensive social media audit every quarter, while others analyze their social media strategy once a year.
Regardless of the frequency, you’ll want to include links in your audit to ensure they’re still relevant and functioning. If you have outdated links in your link-in-bio, you’ll want to remove and replace them. You don’t want customers to wonder if anyone actually maintains your social platforms.
How to use Bitly to simplify your social link management efforts
With Bitly, you can transform your links into powerful tools for your entire organization. Brands that turn to Bitly to maximize the impact of their social media efforts have an array of valuable, user-friendly tools at their fingertips.
Centralized link management
Tracking and organizing links doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Bitly has a comprehensive platform for managing links from one dashboard. Marketers can easily categorize their links by campaign, platform, or content type. This makes analyzing performance and making future campaign decisions a lot easier.
Advanced analytics
With its advanced analytics capabilities, Bitly Analytics gives you a peek under the hood. Marketers can see how their links perform in real time and track engagement metrics like clicks, geographic data, and referral sources.
When they join social media planning meetings, they’ll come armed with insights on how their best content ideas performed. They’ll also know when it’s time to make adjustments to their content calendar and social media marketing strategy.
Valuable integrations
Social media managers often use many free social media management tools. Toggling between those tools can become a productivity nightmare that overcomplicates your workflow.
Fortunately, Bitly integrates with various digital marketing tools and social media channels. That tool you use to schedule content doesn’t have to be separate from the tool you use to create short, trackable links!
Marketers can streamline their workflows, automate link shortening, and ensure every link gets tracked, regardless of where it’s shared.
Customization and branding options
With Bitly, you can create short branded links incorporating your company name or a custom domain. Rather than seeing “bit.ly” in your links, your customers will see your custom domain. This can help build trust with your audience, giving them confidence that the link they’re clicking is legitimate.
You can even add custom back halves to a link to give audiences a preview of what you’re sending them. For example, your.co/summersale tells consumers exactly what they’re getting into, whereas your.co/kjh5 provides no context.
Optimize your social link strategy with Bitly’s suite of tools
If your brand has a social media presence, social link management is a must. This is true whether you manage the social networks for a large company or a small business. Not only can disorganized links frustrate and confuse your customers, but they can also reduce the value of your social media content.
With Bitly Links and Bitly Analytics, it’s easy to keep your social links organized in a single intuitive dashboard. Using Bitly’s custom-branded short links not only has a more professional appearance, it also gives customers valuable context about the content you’re directing them to.
Using multiple social networks? Bitly makes it easy to customize your links with UTM parameters neatly packaged into your short URL. This makes it easy to see which platforms get the most engagement so that you can funnel your marketing efforts accordingly.
Get started with Bitly today to get more powerful insights into your social campaign link performance!
