Hyperlink

A hyperlink is a clickable element in social media—such as text, an image, or some other form of interactive content—that serves to transport users across the digital world, often beyond the confines of the platform itself. Once a user 'clicks' or 'taps' a hyperlink, they are sent across the digital chasm to whatever destination the hyperlink was designed to reach—a webpage, another post, an external resource. Hyperlinks are key components of how we externalize our social media experiences.

They allow us to blend our internal platform with the external web in ways that can sometimes feel seamless and at other times quite jarring (and often not very pretty). What's more, hyperlinks are fundamental in how we work with social media's oftentimes limited sense of immediacy. On platforms like Instagram that don't allow for direct hyperlinks to be placed in captions, we can at least attach hyperlinks in a more obscure fashion to our bios.

And why not? After all, we're in a new media that sometimes can feel quite old-fashioned. We should use hyperlinks creatively to promote access and engagement.