Supermodel Linda Evangelista isn’t like most other famous beauty industry influencers on Instagram now, and her top link shows why. On Instagram, where a user — even a celebrity user — must choose just a single outside-the-app link to put in their profile, the link they choose becomes a statement of business and personal priorities.
For example, Kim Kardashian West has myriad business interests to promote, but her Instagram link presently goes to her fragrance business. Sometimes that top link goes to her shapewear business, SKIMS. The Instagram top link is a very valuable piece of digital real estate, especially if, like Kim Kardashian West, you have 285 million followers.
Another example, less stratospheric in its reach, is that of Cindy Crawford, Evangelista’s contemporary in the supermodel/supermarketer business. Like Kardashian and most others, Crawford uses her top Instagram link to feature a business, her skincare line Meaningful Beauty, thereby letting her six million followers know about the products she produces and favors. It’s all very transactional and welcome; generally followers want to know.
Evangelista also promotes a skincare line, and she places the URL — erasaskinecare.com — unlinked in the profile of her Instagram, where she has more than a million followers. (Evangelista is listed as a Creative Director and Vice President at ERASA.)
But why is the skincare site unlinked? Because Evangelista is currently using her one top Instagram link to feature an article in the New York Times about her lawsuit — a lawsuit that alleges her earning power (and more) was ravaged by a cosmetic procedure gone wrong. According to the Times, Evangelista’s suit claims she was “brutally disfigured.”
By most measures, Evangelista’s Instagram is made less effective as a marketing tool by the commercial link’s absence. Evangelista’s use of her only Instagram link to guide fans to the article, rather than to a product site where she can monetize her followers through purchases, is another sign of how her current situation may be affecting her status as an earner.
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