How to Create Auto-Follow Links for Your Social Media Profiles | by Nate McCallister (@EntreResource) | Oct, 2023

People are clicking on your social media profiles, but many probably aren’t subscribing or following.

I’m going to show you a couple of little tricks you can do with your social profile URLs that will help you turn more people into followers or subscribers. We’re going to turn these links into “auto-follow” or “auto-subscribe” links that prompt the user to follow or subscribe after they click.

This works well because it reduces one step from the flow of going from a visitor to a follower or subscriber.

We do it by adding a little bit of customization to your basic social media profile URLs.

I’ve found ways to use this method on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and LinkedIn.

It’s not a magic pill for growth, but it can certainly boost your growth rate by a good 10%+. At scale, that’s pretty solid!

I wouldn’t show you how to do anything that would get you in trouble. These methods still require the user to explicitly follow or subscribe to your channels. The URLs just make it easier for them to do it by showing a pop-up with a one-click option.

I wrote at length about creating an auto subscribe URL on YouTube on my blog.

The simple explanation is to take your YouTube channel URL and add ?sub_confirmation=1 to the end of it.

The URL for my main YouTube channel looks like this.

http://www.youtube.com/c/EntreResourceVideos?sub_confirmation=1

When users click on that, they’ll see this:

I have a free tool on my website that does this for you if you have issues.

If you don’t know your YouTube URL, it’s easy to find.

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
2. From the left Menu, select Customization
3. Basic info.
4. Under Handle, you can view your handle URL.

This one is easy. Just add your twitter handle (without the @) to the end of this…

https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=Your Handle

Here’s the formula for my Twitter handle: https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=entreresource

When someone clicks on that, they will see this:

I don’t use Twitch, but this is the formula.

https://www.twitch.tv/subs/yourchannel

This is what it would look like for a CounterStrike channel called Elcs.

https://www.twitch.tv/subs/eslcs

LinkedIn is one of the few services that actually gives its users auto-follow links.

This video shows how to find those quickly.

But you can also just use this formula.

www.linkedin.com/comm/mynetwork/discovery-see-all?
usecase=PEOPLE_FOLLOWS&followMember=yourusername

Here is what mine looks like:

www.linkedin.com/comm/mynetwork/discovery-see-all?
usecase=PEOPLE_FOLLOWS&followMember=nathanielmccallister

Users will be directed to a page that looks like this:

Some websites, like Instagram and Facebook, don’t have the ability to make these sorts of links, unfortunately. At least not as of now.

Let me know in the comments if there are any cool auto-subscribe URL hacks you know for other platforms I didn’t cover.