Can’t Link From Instagram? Check Out Mashable’s Nifty Bitly Trick

One of the limitations of Instagram as a social media marketing tool is that links in posts aren’t clickable.

It’s not a deal-breaker — there are many other reasons to use Instagram as part of a marketing mix, including the ability to promote your brand with an active, young audience — but for businesses hoping to bring people back to their websites, the lack of hot links has always been a drawback.

Not a problem without a workaround, however.

Links in Instagram’s profile area are live, a fact that social media news publisher Mashable has been taking advantage of since last spring. Nearly every time Mashable posts on Instagram, it reminds users to click on the link in its profile to learn more about the post’s topic. Here’s how it looked on one of Mashable’s more clicked upon recent Instagram posts:

And the link in the profile? It’s a customized Bitly link — http://on.mash.to/InstaLink — that is updated often to reflect the new content Mashable is promoting.

Using the Bitly link enables Mashable to quickly swap out links — the ability to change the underlying url of a custom Bitly link is an enterprise feature — and also track the success of the effort with Bitly’s analytics. Mashable said it has updated the link more than 150 times since May and seen an average of 60 clicks per post, a click-through rate that Mashable CMO Stacey Martinet is pleased with.

“Instagram is one of Mashable’s most active and growing community platforms,” Martinet wrote in an email to Marketing Land. “As visual story telling becomes an integral part of all social strategies we’re excited there’s a tool that helps to drive traffic back to Mashable’s world class content and are pleased with the results we’ve seen thus far from the Bitly Custom Bitlink.”