Thoughts on The Current State of "Link in Bio" Websites

I'm sure you're familiar with "Link in Bios", websites specifically made for mobile visitors, usually filled with a bunch of links. These sites are put on social media profiles, mostly for personal sites or online businesses that get their audience from the said social media platforms. The links in the site usually link to other social media platforms, to an online shop, to a buy something, or a contact button.

The problem

These sites work well for ~5 links or so, especially if they're just linking to other well-known social media. However, it does have a couple of major downsides.

We interviewed several people with a big following on Twitter, and they mentioned the following problems:

1. When you have a lot of links, it confuses the user

Well of course, with 7+ links, users would be overwhelmed by the amount of text and options they have.

The same rule of thumb as normal websites still applies:

• Too much text: it looks too "hard" and people don't want to read it.
• Too many options: it's hard to choose, especially if they have to read the text for each option before they could choose.

2. The links redirect to another platform → users drop-off

These links usually take you somewhere else entirely, mostly to another social media platform. The worst thing is, these social media platforms are engineered to make users stay on that platform. So if they say something else interesting on that platform, there's no way for you to reel them back!

Let's compare them with normal sites.

We know from building landing pages, we want as little text as possible:

• A clear tagline about what the product is as the first thing they see
• and a clear CTA (Call-To-Action) button

Everything else is to convince the user to do that one thing we want them to do: either signing up for a service, subscribing to a mailing list, or buying a product.

Here's the user journey of a visitor opening a normal site:

Wherever the user goes on that website, it's geared to either give them more information, answer their questions, remove any doubts, and ultimately get them to click on that CTA button and do what we want them to do.

Link in bios, on the other hand, have multiple CTAs

Here's the user journey of a visitor opening a link in bio:

and once they're on YouTube, you're limited to how you can control the users. If they like what they see, they might subscribe. Or they might be suggested something else and they're gone.

But it's not to say that Link in Bio is bad!

Now there's a difference here, link in bios are links on someone's social media profile. That means the user arrived there after seeing the user's social profile, probably after seeing several posts and liking them. They have some context about the person or business. In fact, they might have liked or followed the person/business for a long time!

Help me understand the problem

This is where I am so far in my research on building the mobile version of Typedream ✌️. To get to the next part, which is understanding the problem and building (hopefully) a better solution, I need to know a couple of things.

And you can help! 👇

Thanks for reading! ❤️

Typedream's mobile version is a work in progress, and as you can see, I'm still looking for answers 😄. If you enjoy this behind-the-scenes thought process, let me know!

- Putri