“You can now add up to five links in your Instagram bio. […] Probably one of the most requested features we've had.” - shares Mark Zuckerberg on his Instagram broadcast channel. In this way, Meta has recently introduced a new feature that allows Instagram users to include up to five links in their bio. Facebook-specific links can also be added via a particular button. However, there's a slight catch. Only the first link will be visible in the bio, while the other four links will be concealed in a pop-up context menu. More important, however, is the impact this newly implemented feature will have on Linktree, a third-party tool that had previously been used to solve this problem.
Up until now, the procedure was as follows: creators added their links to Linktree or a similar external tool and as part of their content description, they finished the paragraph with "Check out our link in bio." In fact, a year ago, Linktree made an announcement about its recent funding round, wherein it received $110 million in investments from various financial backers such as Coatue Management and Index Ventures. And while this massive amount of funding pushed Linktree into an advantageous position, as it was then valued at $1.3 billion, today the company is shadowed by the new feature that Meta decided to implement.
What the new Instagram option doesn't provide compared to Linktree, however, are the analytics that most content creators are looking for when adding content links to their profiles. Being able to track the number of clicks on various links is an important feature for analyzing the success of content. Whether or not the adoption of the newly introduced Instagram feature will become ubiquitous is yet to be determined. Until then Linktree's answer to Meta's announcement summarises the situation. The link-in-bio company tweeted a screenshot of Meta's Instagram profile with a Linktree link in the description.