Back to all posts
Social media link building, also called social link building or social backlinking, is a phrase that covers two different things, and they work in different ways. The first is the links the platforms themselves carry, sometimes called social backlinks or social media backlinks: a website field on a profile, a link in a post, a sticker in a story. The second is posting as distribution: a post that puts a page in front of the people who run other sites, some of whom then link to it. Each platform sets its own rules for the first kind, and those rules are written down on the platform's own help pages. The second kind is counted by the people who have done it and written up what happened.
This page works through both in turn. Below, you will find where each of seven platforms lets you put a link and who can add one, as each platform's own help page states it. After that come how to read the attribute on any link and what two counted accounts show about posting as distribution. Then come what three sampled studies found about shares and links, how a visit from a social post shows in Google Analytics, and where a placement fits if you want a link on a publication.
Where each platform lets you put a link
Every statement in this section comes from the platform's own help pages, read on 4 October 2026, and applies to that platform only.
A Facebook Page's profile has a Links section, which Meta describes as links to your websites. On links in posts, Meta's help page states: "you can include links in up to 2 organic posts or comments per month." The page adds two qualifications: "Limits on posts and comments with links may not apply to all Pages." and "The default limit resets on the 1st of each month." It also lists what does not count towards the limit: further links in the comments of a post that already carries one, links to Meta's own services, links for affiliate partners connected through Facebook's affiliate partnerships, and links in ads. It says the limit rises with three of Meta's paid Meta One plans: Advanced, Expert and Max. A separate Meta help page says that people with Facebook access to a Page can share links from it.
Meta's help page for Instagram says a profile can hold up to 5 websites, and that anyone, on or off Instagram, can see them. For Stories, a link sticker puts a link into a story, and tapping the sticker takes the viewer to the linked website. The sticker can be used only in Stories that are not ads.
X
The developer documentation at docs.x.com states that every URL in a post is wrapped with the t.co shortener and counts as 23 characters, whatever its original length. In practice, a long destination address and a short one take the same share of a post.
LinkedIn Help says a profile can display up to three website links, shown in the Contact info section of the profile. Articles published on LinkedIn have an Add Link tool in the editor, so a link can sit inside a longer piece on the platform. The hyperlink that Creator Mode once added to a profile has been removed. A separate LinkedIn Help page says a custom button that links to a website of your choice, and appears on your profile, posts, messages and search results, is available to Premium Business subscribers and to Sales Navigator and Recruiter customers.
TikTok
TikTok Support states: "You can add a link to a website on your TikTok profile if you have at least 1,000 followers, or if you have a Verified Business Account." The same page says that tapping a profile link opens the page in TikTok's in-app browser. TikTok's business help, last updated May 2026, describes Destination Links, which attach an external link to a video and to the top of its comments. The page says you must be a Verified Business Account, and it offers Destination Links to e-commerce customers and to select customers outside e-commerce, in the regions it lists.
YouTube
YouTube Help says a channel page can show up to 14 channel links. Clickable external links in long-form video descriptions and comments need advanced features enabled for the channel. URLs in Shorts descriptions and Shorts comments are not clickable.
Pinterest Help says the link is added in the details of a Pin, alongside its title and board. Certain redirects and URL shorteners are not allowed, so the link should point straight at the destination page. Only the person who created a Pin can edit its link.
A page on a hosted platform such as WordPress.com or Medium is a different thing from a social profile, and our guide to Web 2.0 sites covers those. Forums such as Reddit and Quora set their own link rules, and our guide to forum backlinks covers them.
How to read the attribute on a link
To see what attribute a link carries, you read it from the page itself. Open the page that holds the link in a browser, right-click the link and choose Inspect (or View page source), then find the <a> element in the markup and read its rel value. A link with no rel attribute shows none. The values to look for are nofollow, ugc and sponsored. What you see in the markup is what that page carries, and the check needs nothing beyond the browser you already have.
If you want the definitions, our guide to dofollow and nofollow backlinks explains what each value means, and they are not restated here.
You can run the same check on a profile link, a post link and a link in an article, so check the page that holds the link you care about. For where profile and post links sit among the kinds of link, see our guide to the types of backlinks.
Posting as distribution: two counted accounts
To build links with social media in the second sense, you post a page where the people who run other sites will see it. A post that reaches them can lead those sites to link to the page it points at, and each of the two accounts below is one person's count of one post.
A Hacker News post
Alex Ellman, who built Price Per Token, a site of LLM API prices, wrote on dev.to on 12 August 2025 that he had posted a link to the site on Hacker News, a news and discussion site, at about 8am Eastern, under the headline LLM API Pricing Data. The post reached number 3 on the overall leaderboard, and the site took 12,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. On links, he wrote: "By the next day I had acquired over 100 backlinks from websites that pull popular posts from Hacker News". He also wrote that a later post on the same platform, about a coding tracker he had made, received no upvotes. This is one site, one post and his own figure for the links in place by the next day.
An expert roundup
Daniel Stanica is the founder of the agency COMPETICO. On a page republished on 10 January 2024, he describes a roundup of 50 SEO experts his agency published in 2017: "We got 3519 highly targeted visitors, around 300 new Twitter followers, 500 social media shares, 20 email subscribers, and 14 new backlinks in the first 30 days after we published the expert roundup." He adds that three roundups together brought 42 new backlinks. The page is his agency's guide to creating expert roundups, and the counts sit inside it as the worked example. A roundup is a post that names and quotes the people it hopes will share it, and the counts here are his, from 2017: the 14 links are one roundup's first 30 days, and the 42 are three roundups together.
A post that names a site without linking to it is an unlinked mention, and our guide to brand mentions covers how those are found and asked for; the page you post is the asset, and our guide to linkable assets covers what gets linked.
What the sampled studies found about shares and links
In May 2015, Steve Rayson of BuzzSumo found a correlation of 0.62 between shares and links in a random sample of 10,000 posts, and he called the finding a hypothesis. In separate sets of a few hundred posts each, content published on LinkedIn and BuzzFeed got few links relative to shares, and that part of the finding is about content published on those sites.
In September 2015, Rayson's larger study with Moz, published on Moz's blog, found that in a random sample of 100,000 posts, over 75% had no external links at all. Put plainly, in that sample a post with any external links was the exception.
In a study last updated in February 2019, Backlinko, working with BuzzSumo's data, found a correlation of 0.078 between shares and backlinks across 912 million blog posts.
The two correlations disagree with each other, the three samples measure different things, and none of them is a rate to expect from any one post. The counted accounts above and these samples are the evidence this page has. To see which sites link to a page, our guide to checking a competitor's backlinks walks through the report, and the same report works on your own pages.
How a visit from a social post shows in Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4's default channel group, documented in Google Analytics Help, defines Organic Social as the channel for visits through non-ad links on social sites such as Facebook, and Organic Video as the channel for visits through non-ad links on video sites such as YouTube and TikTok. Referral, in the same documentation, is the channel for visits through non-ad links on other sites, such as blogs and news sites. So a visit from a social post, a visit from a video site and a visit from a link on a blog land in different rows of the same report.
A destination URL tagged with UTM parameters shows its tags in the Traffic acquisition report, so one post's visits can be told from another's.
Where a placement fits
Posting puts a page in front of the people who run sites and leaves the link to them. A placement is a link with a fee, where you choose the target URL and the anchor text. Our Guest Posts are new articles written in-house by our UK team and published on real, independently owned websites in your niche, and you do not write the article yourself. After publication we check that the page is live, that the link is in the body copy, that the anchor and target URL match the order and that the page is indexable, and only then is the URL reported to the dashboard. That check is our quality assurance step, and every delivered link goes through it. Delivered links also carry 12-month replacement cover: if a delivered link is removed or its page is taken down within the cover period, it is replaced like for like.
Answering journalists' requests is another route to a link on a publication, covered in our guide to HARO backlinks. The routes that cost hours rather than a fee are in our guide to getting backlinks for free.
Frequently asked questions
What is social media link building?
The phrase covers two things, and they are measured differently. The first is the links the platforms themselves carry, such as a website field on a profile or a link in a post, each allowed under the platform's own rules. The second is posting as distribution, where a post puts a page in front of the people who run other sites and some of those sites link to it.
Which social media platform is best for link building?
The best social media platform for link building is the one whose rules let you place the link you want, because each platform sets its own rules on where a link can go and who can add one. The clearest thresholds, from each platform's own page, are TikTok's 1,000 followers or Verified Business Account for a profile link, Facebook's two Page posts or comments with links per month where that limit applies, and YouTube's advanced features for clickable links in long-form video descriptions and comments.
Are social media links backlinks?
A link from a profile or post on another domain to your page, such as a link on a Facebook Page or a TikTok profile, is a link from another site to yours. You read the attribute it carries from the page itself: right-click the link, choose Inspect and read the rel value on the <a> element. The definitions of the values are in our guide to dofollow and nofollow backlinks.
How do I measure the links I get from a social post?
Count the visits in Google Analytics 4's Organic Social channel, and in its Organic Video channel for video sites such as YouTube and TikTok, and tag the destination URL so one post's visits can be told from another's. Count the links with a backlink report on the page you posted. Both counts sit outside the platforms themselves, in your own analytics and in a backlink report.
related Blog Posts
Join 7,000+ Clients Growing with Rhino Rank
Sign Up
Stay ahead of the SEO curve
Get the latest link building strategies, SEO tips and industry insights delivered straight to your inbox.