Most campaign social media accounts still operate like it's 2018. Post a link to the donation page. Post a link to the blog. Post a link to the event signup. Every post exists to push people somewhere else.
The platforms have spent years making sure that doesn't work. Nate Silver highlighted the problem earlier this month: the New York Times, with 53 million followers on X, published a link to critical original reporting on Iran and got 94 likes and 33 retweets. A Nieman Lab analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers confirmed it – link-heavy accounts are clustered at the bottom of the engagement chart regardless of follower count.
It's not just X. Meta has been telling Page managers for over a year that organic posts with links get suppressed. The math is simple across every major platform: links get buried.
When Links Worked
Link posting worked for a long time. Facebook in the mid-2010s would happily send traffic to your website. Twitter rewarded timely links to news coverage. The playbook was straightforward: post a link, write a caption, watch the clicks come in.
That era is over. Social platforms make money by keeping users scrolling, and every link is an invitation to leave. Understanding this is the difference between using the algorithm for your campaign and letting the algorithm use you.
Think Like A User
Think about how you actually use social media. When you open Instagram or scroll X, you're there for news or entertainment. You're not there to click links, fill out forms, or complete calls to action.
Your voters and supporters are the same way. A post with a link is asking them to stop doing the thing they came to do. Most of them won't.
Discovery, Not Conversion
The better way to think about social media is as a discovery channel. It's where potential voters and supporters find you for the first time. It's not where you convert them.
Instead of trying to extract someone from the platform and onto your donation page, you're introducing them to your candidate, your message, and your values – right there in their feed. The conversion happens later, through retargeting ads, email sequences, or your website when someone actively seeks you out.
Too many campaigns try to collapse the entire funnel into a single post with a link. You skip the discovery step, ask people who barely know you to take action, and the platform buries the post at the same time.
What To Post Instead
Native content is the way forward. A 60-second clip of your candidate talking about an issue instead of a link to a five-minute YouTube video. A graphic that explains your position instead of a link to your issues page. A story from the trail in a text post instead of a link to a blog recap.
If the content is good enough on its own, the audience will come to you. They'll follow your account, look up your website, and end up on your email list – not because you pushed a link at them, but because you gave them a reason to care.
For the tactical specifics on handling links when you do need to share them, we covered workarounds like links in comments and retargeting here.
Conclusion
Social media's job in your campaign has changed. The sooner you stop treating it as a link farm and start treating it as the top of your funnel, the sooner you'll reach voters your competitors are missing entirely.