Linktree has been a go-to Link in Bio solution for tons of artists, entrepreneurs, creatives and others for a long time now.  They’re the most well known brand that offers this kind of solution so it’s surely the best, right?  We’ll leave that judgement up to you once we compare the two platforms’ strengths, weaknesses, and unique quirks.

What is a ‘Link in Bio’ software?

For the uninitiated, various social media platforms and other sites allow you to link your other social sites, personal websites, affiliate products, album drops, etc.  It’s an easy way to connect your followers and fans to platforms where they might want to do some more research on what it is you’re all about.

As you can see here, this is a snapshot of an event promoter in Sacramento who uses Linktree in their bio.  This allows the visitor to see what other platforms the page owner utilizes to connect with their audience and perhaps give them a follow somewhere the visitor might be more active or engaged.

Linktree

You may have heard of Luci, a bass music producer and vocalist extraordinaire.  She also rocks a Linktree in her Instagram bio.  However, when you click the link, the options presented in front of you are… shall we say… abundant.  If you take a look at the images below, you’ll see exactly what we mean.

These are most of the clickable options on Luci’s Linktree, and as you can see, it’s a lot to take in.  There’s a ton of scrolling involved to see every available option, which kind of defeats the purpose of a ‘condensed’ web page alternative.  That being said, Linktree isn’t all bad.  There’s plenty of useful features that we’ll dive into.

Something that our Exalt team is really focused on as a point of value is the analytics tab that you can access from your admin page.  The metrics for a free subscriber only entail the total amount of link clicks you’ve had over each new links’ lifespan, which is useful in its own right.  For subscribers, you get more detailed metrics to help you track sales and marketing efforts with your brand.  We don’t have much reason to get the paid version so we can’t show you what that looks like, but here’s a snapshot of what the free analytics screen looks like.

As you can see here, you get some basic insights on how your Linktree is being used by other page visitors.  Unrelated, but when I started writing this article, I thought these numbers would be a lot lower so I’m actually pleasantly surprised here. 

Anyway, these metrics don’t offer much insight into how a comprehensive marketing effort is going at a glance, which can be a hurdle if your marketing approach is to re-direct people from your socials to your Linktree and then somewhere else.  In that case, you may want to consider subscribing to a higher tier to gain access to that information.

At $9 a month, it’s not a huge financial burden, so it’s up to you to decide if that’s worth the value.

There’s also a subscribe for notifications option with Linktree, but we don’t have any hands on experience with this.  In the meantime, you can refer to this article HERE if you want some more perspectives.

Pinpoint

Pinpoint is the latest drop in the Link in Bio market. The main difference between Pinpoint and Linktree is in their target market strategy.  While Linktree stands to be a cater-to-all Link in Bio solution, Pinpoint has its sights primarily focused on artists.  Let’s take a look at the solutions Pinpoint aims to deliver and look at the key differences between them and Linktree.

The Pinpoint team was kind enough to build and customize the Hastati landing page for us.  As you can tell, there is a stark contrast between the two, most notably in terms of aesthetics.  Pinpoint relegates profile links to various platforms displayed as simple icons.  This frees up a lot of real estate and creates a different focal point for the visitor.  Because our artists are the most important thing to us, we wanted to highlight our artists and have them be the first thing your attention is drawn to.  Artists have a lot of customization opportunities here, and can highlight their latest track releases, tickets to shows and tours they’re on, merch and music videos.

There’s a lot more customization with Pinpoint vs Linktree.  Although Linktree does allow for some customization, you’re restricted to their predefined colors and template styles as a free user.  However, with Pinpoint, you’re free to customize as you wish for the background and header photo whether you pay for one of their higher tiers or not.  This means with the proper graphic designer, your artistic expression options are limitless which is a huge win for artists looking to showcase the deeper messages of their music.

Another quality of life upgrade we enjoy from Pinpoint is that we know right from the start how their own subscriber feature works.  SMS based blasts are tied directly into your own SMS ‘mailing list’ where you can not only send out text blasts for updates, album drops, tour announcements, and merch drops, but also just to strike up a friendly converstation.  All receivers of text blasts are able to reply to your blast, however, that’s where the line of communication ends as replying to a reply is currently impossible.  It would be neat if we could see full blown conversations with fans, but we’re already happy to see that there have been fresh ways to engage fans that other platforms currently do not offer.

The text blasts do come at a price, which is bundled into a still yet-to-be-released set of subscription options.  However, it does make sense to think of this feature in a long term growth strategy for artists who are seeking a diversified and fresh marketing strategy.  It helps corner a segment of consumers that may engage better with SMS based communication vs. other traditional means such as email lists, Discord servers, Facebook groups and Instagram Broadcast Channels.

This is a stark contrast to the example we gave earlier with Luci’s Linktree profile which required multiple scrolls on the phone version just to see all the social platforms she was on, not even taking into consideration the other links she had included.  We feel that this allows the user of a Pinpoint account to fully focus on meaningful announcements by drawing the attention to things like new music or shows while also not neglecting the opportunity to redirect a visitor to a new social channel the visitor may be more engaged on.

One thing we were pleased to find was collaborative functions for team members.  As an artist manager, being able to see every moving part of the work efforts my artists engage in is crucial to be able to analyze and optimize these efforts.  Being able to plug multiple team members in is also useful especially when engaging in collaborative works with labels, agents, promoters, and touring related things.

Team members have access to all the metrics visible within Pinpoint for the account(s) they get added to.  In addition they are able to make some changes to the Pinpoint profile that they have access to.

Now, we’ve said a lot of great things about Pinpoint, and it is a great product in its own right, but we’re not without our critiques.  One thing we were disappointed in was that many of the same features that Linktree hides behind a paywall (such as seeing more detailed metrics) were also hidden behind Pinpoint’s paywall.  In addition, when it comes to featuring music tracks, one advantage we feel Linktree has over Pinpoint is that you can preview Soundcloud and Spotify tracks within the Linktree browser, which you cannot do with Pinpoint.  Pinpoint does differentiate itself here though, by offering a means for people to directly download songs from its browser so we’ll call that a draw between Linktree and Pinpoint.

All in all, each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses.  Linktree has been around for a pretty long time, so they’ve had the opportunity to roll out lots of features, so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to hold Pinpoint (which is still in its closed beta as of the writing of this article) to the same standard as Linktree.  However, we love the vision that Pinpoint has in specifically catering their features to artists and music industry professionals.  Although Pinpoint primarily aims to market itself to artists and their management teams, we see lots of utility for promoters and festival organizers as well.

Do we recommend any platform over the other?  Well, that depends on what you’re going to need to get out of your Link In Bio solution.  Do you need robust marketing and tracking features?  Is artistic and/or visual branding paramount to your strategy?  There are too many different types of users to give a generalized ‘this platform is superior to the other’, however we will suffice it to say that our personal preference here at Hastati is Pinpoint.  We also encourage our artists to use it as well.  

Pinpoint has a promising future, and being able to speak directly with their team about features that would prove useful to artists and music industry professionals has been fantastic to be able to see more of what we would get use out of.  Being brand new and this robust, we believe that the Pinpoint team will be delivering on some killer updates in the months and years to come.