We’re sitting down with leaders on the business side of the creator economy to get their best advice for creators looking to launch and develop their careers. This week, we spoke with Anthony Zaccaria, the co-founder of Linktree.
Linktree is arguably the most famous link-in-bio tool on the market, allowing users to customize a personal page to house multiple links to attach to Instagram, TikTok, and other social pages. Linktree has over 24 million users, including some of the world’s biggest brands and celebrities, including TikTok, Red Bull, Comedy Central, Selena Gomez, Shawn Mendes, and Bella Poarch.
Zaccaria told Passionfruit about his career, Linktree’s vision, its appeal to creators, and his advice for those using Linktree.
Anthony Zaccaria got his start in the music industry, working with his brother Alex Zaccaria in artist management for DJs and bands. Back in the early 2000s and 2010s, he said he noticed artists struggling to direct social media followers to all the things they were producing—music, concerts, meet and greets, and merchandise.
“The idea came through that pain point of, there has to be a better way to direct fans to the content we’re producing,” Zaccaria told Passionfruit.
After the Zaccaria brothers, alongside business partner Nick Humphreys, expanded their business from only music marketing to a full-blown digital marketing agency for a variety of brands, they soon decided to hone in on the simple idea of creating one link to direct social media users to multiple links on their client’s social media pages. In 2016, they created the Linktree product and looped their clients in.
Shortly after Linktree’s launch, without much advertising or promotion, more and more users started to join. Entertainers, creators, brands, and anyone producing content found potential in the tool to create a unified social presence in an increasingly online world, scattered across multiple platforms.
Zaccaria said he thinks users are attracted to Linktree because “fragmentation” across apps and tools—think TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Patreon, Cameo, Substack—has become more intense. The heart of Linktree’s ethos is simplicity, and improving the creator experience.
“The fear you have to produce across all platforms is stressful,” Zaccaria said. “I guess, of course, you don’t have to produce on all of them, but there is a bit of that FOMO. The ways for folks to grow an audience, grow a community and to monetize have also grown with the explosion of the creator economy over the last few years.”
To help creator’s unify their presence across different platforms and apps, Linktree has made a push to integrate with a wide variety of brands—like Shopify, Amazon, Spring, Vimeo, and YouTube—to make Linktree pages a one-stop shop for creators, followers, and fans.
“It’s been very intentional from the beginning. When you think back to why we created it, there’s got to be a better way to simplify this fragmentation. As we’ve grown and added more functionality, you’re able to do more,” Zaccaria shared.
Zaccaria said Linktree’s notoriety and name-recognition in the online world also helps creators build trust with their audience.
“If you’re a creator, and you’re sending this link out there, you don’t want people to think, ‘What am I clicking on? This is some random spam link’,” Zaccaria said.
Riley Lemon (@RileyDoingThings), a creator with over 1.2 million followers on TikTok who has previously partnered with Linktree for promotional videos, told Passionfruit he appreciates Linktree for its ease-of-use and focus on the creator experience.
“I view Linktree almost as an assistant as it helps manage all of my social media links, websites, products and services, et cetera… Linktree makes it easy for creators to want to use their platform compared to others as their platform is very user-friendly and creator-focused,” Lemon said.
Creator and make-up artist Carrie Esser (@makeupmadhouse), who has over 382,400 followers on TikTok and Instagram, also was approached by Linktree to create a promotional video. Prior to the partnership, Esser attempted to make her own link-in-bio website page with buttons and links. She told Passionfruit she realized the page was “messy” and not “user friendly.”
Esser was offered a free year-long premium account with Linktree. Linktree offers multiple pricing tiers per month—including a free option, a $5 “starter” plan, a $9 “pro” plan, and a $24 “premium” plan. Different tiers allow users to access special analytics, link scheduling, e-commerce, embedding, integration, animation, and aesthetic features.
Using the premium service, Esser said she loves to play around with different themes and customizations. She thought it was super easy for herself and her audience to use.
“Your audience trusts it,” Esser said. “They know when they click on it that it will be easy to use, they’re going to be able to find the links they want, and everything is going to be in a simple format.”
Esser recommends other creators organize their most important information at the top, and also likes having her links separated out by subsections to make things easier to find. Lemon, on the other hand, recommended creators respond and adapt to analytics.
“Turn the data that Linktree provides you into meaningful information that could increase the exposure to the other platforms you want viewers to find you on,” Lemon said. “Try different ways of displaying your links and how you are positioning it on the page… I view my Linktree page just like I do my videos, I want to give a viewer a reason to want to watch or in this case a reason to click on a link.”
Zaccaria also shared some tips for creators looking to make the most out of their Linktree page: customize fonts, colors, and other features to match your online persona; add your Linktree to all your social pages to connect fans across platforms; and limit yourself to 5 or 6 key links to drive traffic.
“Put it everywhere you’re posting content and monetizing,” Zaccaria said. “And then it’s just using all the functions as it makes sense without bombarding and having a list of 100 links.”
While Linktree’s vision of simplicity in the age of a chaotic online world remains true to its roots, Zaccaria is paying attention to how the creator economy changes as he looks towards future partnerships for the company.
“You want to grow and engage your audience, you want to monetize and find a reliable, stable income—those are just some of the things we’re going to continue to build upon, building more and more tools to allow creators to build and own their audiences,” Zaccaria said.
This article has been corrected to reflect that Linktree has 24 million users.
Are you the co-founder of a company in the creator economy? Email grace.stanley@fragmnt.com for a chance to get included in an upcoming newsletter.
