How to Hyperlink in a LinkedIn Post

Adding a clickable link to your LinkedIn post is one of the most direct ways to guide your audience to your products, blog posts, or portfolio. But getting it right involves more than just copying and pasting a URL. This guide walks you through the step-by-step process of hyperlinking on LinkedIn and covers the strategies you need to maximize your clicks and engagement.

Why Bother with Hyperlinks on LinkedIn?

Before jumping into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." A well-placed hyperlink does more than just move someone from point A to point B. It’s a core part of building your brand and driving results on the platform. Strategic linking helps you:

• Drive Traffic: The most obvious benefit. Hyperlinks are the bridge between your LinkedIn presence and your own digital real estate, whether that's your company website, a new blog post, a landing page, an event registration, or your personal portfolio.
• Provide Value &, Resources: Sharing links to helpful articles, case studies, or tools builds authority and trust with your audience. You become a go-to resource in your industry, which encourages people to follow you for your curated content.
• Boost Conversions: Each hyperlink can be a direct path to a conversion point, whether it's signing up for a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, or making a purchase. It connects intent with action. Learn how to generate leads on LinkedIn.
• Measure Your Impact: Using trackable links (like UTM parameters or custom short links) gives you concrete data on what content resonates with your LinkedIn audience. You can see exactly which posts are driving traffic and what topics people care about most. Discover how to calculate your engagement rate on LinkedIn.

Two Main Ways to Add a Link (And Our Recommendation)

On LinkedIn, there isn't a magical button to turn a piece of text into a hyperlink directly within a standard post. Instead, you have two primary methods for sharing your URLs. Let's break down each one.

Method 1: Pasting the URL Directly (The Native Link Preview)

This is the simplest and most common way to add a hyperlink to a LinkedIn post. When you paste a URL into the post editor, LinkedIn automatically fetches information from the webpage and generates a clickable link preview card.

Step-by-Step Instructions (Desktop &, Mobile):

1. Start a new post. Click "Start a post" at the top of your LinkedIn feed on desktop or tap the "Post" button in the navigation bar on the mobile app.
2. Write your caption. Start by crafting the textual part of your post. Add context, tell a brief story, or ask a question to capture your audience's attention before they see the link. Read our guide on how to write a compelling LinkedIn post.
3. Paste the full URL. Copy the full URL you want to share (e.g., `https://www.yourwebsite.com/blog-post`) and paste it into the composer box, usually after your text.
4. Wait for the preview to generate. In a few seconds, you'll see a box appear below your text containing a featured image, a title, and the source website name. This entire box becomes your clickable hyperlink.
5. (Optional but recommended) Delete the text URL. Once the link preview card has loaded, you can delete the raw URL text from your caption. This makes your post look much cleaner and more professional, while the preview card remains fully clickable and functional.

Pros:

• High visibility: The preview card is large, visual, and impossible to miss. It draws the eye and gives users a clear idea of what they're clicking on.
• Good user experience: It's straightforward. The user sees a compelling preview and clicks it directly. There's no hunting around for a link in the comments.
• Professional look: A clean preview card looks more polished than just a plain URL string in the text.

Cons:

• Potential algorithm deprioritization: Social platforms, including LinkedIn, generally prefer content that keeps users on their site. Posts with external links can sometimes see slightly less organic reach than posts without them. However, LinkedIn has improved this over the years, and a good link with high engagement can still perform very well.

Our verdict: This is the best method for most situations. It provides the cleanest user experience and is the official, intended way to share external content on the platform.

Method 2: The 'Link in the Comments' Strategy

You’ve probably seen posts that end with a phrase like "link in comments." This strategy became popular as a workaround to the LinkedIn algorithm potentially penalizing external links. The idea is to publish a text-only or image-only post first, hopefully gaining more initial reach, and then immediately add the hyperlink as the first comment.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Create your post without the link. Write a compelling text-only, image, or video post.
2. Add a call-to-action (CTA). End your post by explicitly telling people where to find the link. Use phrases like, "I'll drop the guide in the first comment" or use an arrow emoji like "👇 Get the checklist in the comments below."
3. Publish the post.
4. Immediately add your link. As soon as the post is live, click the "Comment" button and paste your URL into the comment field. You should be the very first person to comment on your own post.

The big question: Does it still work?

A few years ago, this was a highly effective tactic for boosting reach. Today, its effectiveness is debatable. LinkedIn’s algorithm is constantly evolving, and many social media experts have found that the performance boost is negligible now. Furthermore, it creates friction for the user, they have to stop, find the comment section, and then locate your link. For a user quickly scrolling their feed, that extra step can be enough to make them move on.

Our verdict: While it might be worth A/B testing with your own content, the native link preview is generally superior for user experience. If your goal is to get clicks, make it as easy as possible for people to click.

Advanced Strategies to Make Your Links Irresistible

Knowing how to add a link is only half the battle. Making that link count is what separates amateur content from professional social media marketing. Find out how to optimize your LinkedIn profile for maximum impact.

1. Create True Hyperlinked Text (The Article Method)

While you can't hyperlink a specific phrase like this one in a standard LinkedIn post, you absolutely can in a LinkedIn Article or Newsletter. This is a powerful, underutilized strategy.

LinkedIn Articles provide a full-fledged text editor where you can format your text, add multiple images, and - most importantly - create anchor text hyperlinks just like in a blog post.

The strategy:

1. Write a LinkedIn article: Go to your LinkedIn homepage and click “Write an article.” Create an in-depth piece of content that provides immense value. Inside this article, you can hyperlink text that points to your website, different resources, or other connections. If you don't have one yet, here's a guide on how to create a company page on LinkedIn.
2. Publish the article: This creates a piece of long-form content that lives on LinkedIn itself.
3. Create a standard post teaser: Now, create a new standard LinkedIn post. In this post, write a short, compelling teaser about your new article and use the Native Link Preview method (Method 1) to link to it.

This approach gives you the best of both worlds: you post a link, but it keeps users within the LinkedIn ecosystem initially, which the algorithm often favors. Inside the article, you are in full control and can drive traffic to whatever external sites you want.

2. Customize Your Link Preview with Open Graph Tags

Ever pasted a link and LinkedIn pulled an old, ugly picture or a strange line of text for the title? This information isn't pulled randomly. It's controlled by something called Open Graph tags in your website's HTML code, so you can control what appears in LinkedIn's preview card.

Open Graph tags tell social platforms:

• og:title: The title that shows in the link preview card.
• og:description: The short summary that appears under the title.
• og:image: The exact image URL to feature in the preview.

These code snippets are part of your webpage's <,head>, section. For example:

<,meta property="og:title" content="Your Amazing Blog Post Title" />,
<,meta property="og:description" content="This is the definitive guide to being productive and successful." />,
<,meta property="og:image" content="https://www.yourwebsite.com/blog-image.jpg" />,

If your preview card still looks wrong, use a tool like LinkedIn’s Post Inspector to clear the site’s cache for your URL and re-fetch the latest information.

Use Branded Link Shorteners

Instead of pasting a long, raw URL like `https://yourwebsite.com/product/category/2024/new-release`, use a branded shortener to create a link that is clean and reinforces your brand, like `yourbr.and/new-release`.

The benefits include:

• Brand reinforcement: It builds trust and is easy to remember.
• Better analytics: Services like Bitly and Rebrandly allow you to track clicks in detail.
• Customization: They are easy to remember and type out.

Craft a Strong Call to Action (CTA)

Never just drop a link into your post - give people a compelling reason to click it. A great call to action should be clear, concise, and persuasive.

• Ask a question: "What are your thoughts on this strategy? Read my full analysis in the link."
• Create urgency: "My new guide is free for the next 24 hours. Grab yours here!"
• Use emojis to draw attention: "Get the full checklist here 👇".

Final Thoughts

Mastering how to effectively place hyperlinks in your LinkedIn content is a simple but vital skill. It's not just about sharing a URL, it's about a consistent strategy that drives meaningful action from your audience, provides genuine value, and turns your presence into a reliable traffic driver.

As you incorporate these strategies, planning your content becomes key to getting results. When you're managing multiple posts and links, a platform like Postbase can make a world of difference. With Postbase, you can plan, create, and schedule all your promotional content from a single visual calendar. This ensures every link you share is part of a deliberate strategy, published at the right time to reach the widest audience and drive the most clicks.