Linktree: Podcast Link
Empowering podcast creators to grow their audience
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Product design
- Prototyping
- Delivery documentation
- QA
TEAM
- Product Manager
- Technical Lead
- Front-end Engineer
PLATFORM
Responsive web application
TIMELINE
2 months
Responsive web application
TIMELINE
2 months
CONTEXT
Linktree is the world’s most popular link in bio tool. It enables +35M people—including some of the world’s biggest brands, influencers and celebrities—to unify their digital presence and share everything they create, curate and sell online from a simple, customisable landing page. Collectively, Linktrees receive +1.2 billion unique visitors a month.
The atomic unit of a Linktree is a “link”, which can be anything from a simple URL that redirects a visitor to another webpage, to a dynamic experience with rich embedded video or audio content from popular social media platforms.
PROBLEM
In an effort to extend their reach, connect with new fans and grow their audience, podcast creators host their shows on as many platforms as possible. This is because listeners often look beyond the top services (e.g. Spotify and Apple Podcasts) to discover content.
We identified a trend amongst podcast creators using Linktree where they would create seperate links directing to each platform their podcast was hosted on. Not only was this a frustrating and time consuming process to set up, but the resulting list of links occupied the majority of the space on their Linktree, pushing other content further down the page where it’s less likely to be seen and engaged with by visitors, particularly on mobile.
Linktree is the world’s most popular link in bio tool. It enables +35M people—including some of the world’s biggest brands, influencers and celebrities—to unify their digital presence and share everything they create, curate and sell online from a simple, customisable landing page. Collectively, Linktrees receive +1.2 billion unique visitors a month.
The atomic unit of a Linktree is a “link”, which can be anything from a simple URL that redirects a visitor to another webpage, to a dynamic experience with rich embedded video or audio content from popular social media platforms.
PROBLEM
In an effort to extend their reach, connect with new fans and grow their audience, podcast creators host their shows on as many platforms as possible. This is because listeners often look beyond the top services (e.g. Spotify and Apple Podcasts) to discover content.
We identified a trend amongst podcast creators using Linktree where they would create seperate links directing to each platform their podcast was hosted on. Not only was this a frustrating and time consuming process to set up, but the resulting list of links occupied the majority of the space on their Linktree, pushing other content further down the page where it’s less likely to be seen and engaged with by visitors, particularly on mobile.
This also wasn’t ideal from a visitor’s perspective. Anyone arriving on a Linktree had to spend time searching for their preferred streaming service with only the title of the link (provided by the creator) to go by, as there was no way to visually differentiate between different platforms. Additionally, for anyone unfamiliar with the podcast, there was no way to access additional context such as subject matter, when it was created and how many episodes there are.
SOLUTION
I led the end-to-end design of a new Podcast Link type that consolidates all the platforms a podcast is hosted on into one interactive, engaging surface, resulting in a better experience for creators and their visitors. Leveraging a unique content matching service (powered by SongLink/Odezli, which was acquired by Linktree in 2021), creators only need to provide a single URL and Linktree will automatically detect everywhere the podcast is available to stream. The podcast’s display imagery and description are automatically populated, and visitors can even listen to a preview of recent episodes.
Adding a Podcast Link as a creator
Final visual design elements of Podcast Link’s visitor experience
OUTCOME
Following a successful rollout, go to market campaign and release in Linktree’s App Marketplace, as of June 2023 there were 248,585 active Podcast Links across 180,646 Linktree accounts with a 61% adoption rate (i.e. 61% of creators that added an eligible podcast URL to their Linktree are using Podcast Link).