‘The Link Is In The First Comment’ – Arrrrhhhh

Fractal Marketing - with Gerard Doyle

So I have a theory about ‘links in the comments’ – I don’t believe that Linkedin directly reduces the reach because of a link in the post, even though it is apparent that the reach is reduced. My theory is that the reduced reach is the collateral impact of people clicking on the link rather than clicking on a reaction. When those people come back to LinkedIn after reading your article, they often don’t see the original post or they are ‘done’ and so move on. So by adding the links in the comments, all we’re doing is shuffling the interactions between ‘reactions’ and ‘clicks’. The problem we face is that Linkedin does not want to credit driving traffic off-platform. So external link clicks are not earning positive interaction credits that expand the reach. So because people tend to either click or react, with only the later increasing reach, we’ve tricked ourselves into falsely blaming the existence of a link to the existence of a link, to the reduced reach, when it is the leaking of the positive engagement signals through clicks.