The most important link on any social media platform is the link in your bio. That’s where viewers go to learn more about your company after seeing one of your TikTok videos.
Companies ranging from small brands like Housemakers Coffee to big airlines like Qantas Airlines use third-party link-in-bio tools in order to curate a few of their most important products, plus direct followers to their other social media profiles.
TikTok and Instagram have strict limits on the number of links you can post. That means that, though someone might discover a new product of yours in a TikTok video, they can’t directly click your link in the video description in order to make a direct purchase.
A Link-in-bios offers a way around that. While many private link-in-bio companies have popped up in recent years—with Linktree being the most prominent—now Shopify has come out with its own offering, called Linkpop.
Using a Linkpop for your Instagram or TikTok link-in-bio is free for Shopify sellers, and it lets them display their products—through a pop-up landing page—complete with an “add to cart” option, directly on the link-in-bio.
Among other features, Linkpop lets customers add multiple products to their cart at once, directly on each Linkpop shoppable link, for a more seamless checkout experience.
Linkpop offers many advantages.
The simplest application of a link-in-bio tool is to direct people to your online store on Shopify or your other social media pages.
If someone discovers you on TikTok, a link-in-bio lets you list the other places you have an online presence:
You can also use these links to direct people to some of your brand’s other social media offerings. For instance, if you run a Facebook group for your most devoted customers, you can highlight that at the top of your link-in-bio.
One benefit of a link-in-bio is that it lets you curate a small selection of products that you’re really trying to push. Most Linkpop pages feature between three and five products, often new releases that each company is trying to hype up.
You can also curate your Linkpop to draw extra attention to products you’ve recently displayed on your Instagram or TikTok profile.
If you just posted about a product on TikTok, you can assume that a disproportionate number of people will click your link-in-bio to find out more about that item. A regularly updated Linkpop also means you can funnel viewers directly to your purchase page.
Even if you don’t have physical products to sell, you can use a Linkpop to promote other types of offerings.
On Linkpop, brands can create a banner that directs users to their non-product offerings. The nutrition brand Marea, for instance, offers 20% off on its membership program to people who visit its Linkpop.
For many brands, it can be hard to track how many of their sales or website visits are coming from social platforms. That is especially true for TikTok, which for the time being offers fewer attribution tools than, say, Facebook does.
While brands now have the option of adding a TikTok Pixel for Shopify, which will track overlap between your TikTok and Shopify audiences, a Linkpop presents another way to measure how much of your audience is coming from TikTok.
When you add a Linkpop to your bio on TikTok, many users will click through the Linkpop link in order to view your products. That way, you can quantify how much traffic to your Shopify store is coming from TikTok.
You can also get a clearer sense of how, say, a viral video on TikTok corresponds to website visits or outright sales. The hair removal brand Sugardoh, which has nearly half a million followers on TikTok, said it has tested using Linkpop as an analytics tool.
Some brands have used Linkpop to direct visitors, who discover them on social media, to their FAQs pages or their help pages.
At the top of the Linkpop of the plastic-free razor brand Leaf Shave, for instance, the company links to its customer service page with the caption “Questions? Need help?”
For brands, Linkpop provides a space where you can link people to your different customer support offerings, including your FAQs page, your return policy, your shipping details, and more.
But brands shouldn’t only rely on people to click links to find customer support information. Savvy brands use features—like Instagram’s Stories Highlights or TikTok’s Playlists—to directly answer customer questions on social media.
You should also hire customer support teams who can talk to your customers directly in the social media comments.
Chatdesk Teams does this, providing flexible customer support teams who can answer customer questions or concerns directly on TikTok, Instagram, and more. Schedule a demo to see it in action.
However, Linkpop has one disadvantage.
With your own link-in-bio, you lose your ability to track who is viewing your products and clicking your links.
While Shopify does offer some bare-bones analytics—including the ability to track metrics like the number of visits, link clicks, and clicks per visit on your Linkpop—it’s not nearly as in-depth as other website tracking systems.
Shopify said in a tweet that Linkpop doesn’t let you add any custom JavaScript to your link-in-bio page. That means that brands can’t add popular tracking tools, like the Facebook Pixel, to their Linkpop pages.
However, that might not be true forever. Shopify said that it would “investigate” adding more analytics information in the future.