TL;DR: Citizens Channel is an independent Albanian news outlet with 112,000 followers on Instagram. Its link in bio isn’t a list of links. It’s the newsroom’s latest posts, and every post opens the full story on citizens.al. A reader who sees a headline on Instagram is two taps from the article, even when it was posted ten minutes ago.
By Denis Qyra, Marketer at Linkie · Last updated 25 October 2026
Who Citizens Channel is
Citizens Channel covers Albania from the street up: protests, courts, police, the environment. Its Linkie page carries the newsroom’s own line, “Nga qytetarët, për qytetarët”, from citizens, for citizens.
It publishes a lot. As of 25 October 2026 its Instagram account shows 4,804 posts. [CONFIRM: 4,804 posts and 112K followers were read off Instagram on 25 October.] In the week before we wrote this, the posts on its link in bio covered a student protest, a university lecturers’ boycott, a lawsuit over hydropower plants on the Cem river and a complaint about police violence, with several stories most days.
[CONFIRM WITH CITIZENS: who runs their social accounts, and how many people post.]
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The problem every newsroom on Instagram has
Instagram doesn’t make links in captions clickable. So a news post says “full story at the link in bio”, and the reader goes to the bio.
For a shop or a creator, that’s a small annoyance. For a newsroom it breaks the whole thing. By the time someone taps the bio, the outlet has published three more stories. A bio with one link, or even five, can’t point at the right article for every post. The reader lands on the homepage, doesn’t find the story, and leaves.
What Citizens Channel does instead
Open linkie.bio/citizens.al and there’s almost nothing to read before the news. The logo, a red Web button to citizens.al, a row of icons for its other channels. Then “Latest posts”: the newest posts from the feed, in order, each one a tile with the image the reader just saw on Instagram.
Each tile opens the matching article on citizens.al. The student protest post opens the protest story. The Cem river post opens the lawsuit. Nobody at Citizens edits the bio when a story goes up.
The page updates itself because the posts come through Linkie’s posts feed. [CONFIRM WITH CITIZENS: whether they publish through Publer or connect through the Linkie API.] When a post goes out, it appears on the Linkie page with its own redirect link, here the article URL.
[CONFIRM WITH CITIZENS: a quote from their editor or social lead on why they set it up this way, and what changed for readers.]
What a reader actually does
Someone scrolling Instagram sees a headline about the protest. The caption says the story is at the link in bio. They tap the profile, tap the link, see the same image at the top of the page, tap it, and they’re reading the article on citizens.al.
The step that matters is the third one. The reader recognizes the post. They don’t have to search a list of section links or the outlet’s homepage for a story they saw a minute ago.
Why it fits a newsroom better than a list of links
A list of links is built for things that don’t change: the website, the newsletter, the donate page. News is the opposite. The most important link is the newest one, and it changes several times a day.
Citizens keeps both. The Web button and the channel icons are the permanent part. The posts are the part that changes, and it changes without anyone touching it.
What else Linkie can add for a newsroom
Everything Citizens uses so far is about getting the reader to the story. A few things on Linkie Plus go further for a publisher:
See which stories get the clicks. Analytics show how many people visit the page and what they tap, so the social team can see which stories send readers to the site, not only which ones get likes.
Grow the newsletter from the same page. Email collection adds a signup to the link in bio, for readers who want the stories without Instagram deciding what they see.
Put the page on the outlet’s own domain, for example a links subdomain of citizens.al, so the address readers see is the newsroom’s.
Run sister pages from one account. An outlet with a second brand, a podcast or a language edition can run each one as its own Linkie page and switch between them without logging out.
Linkie has no branding on any plan, so none of this puts our name on a newsroom’s page. Plus is $90 a year per page. The full list is on the plans page.
FAQ
Can a news site link every Instagram post to its article?
Not in the post itself, because Instagram captions aren’t clickable. A link-in-bio page that shows the outlet’s latest posts, each linked to its article, gets the reader there in two taps from the profile.
Does the page update when we publish a new post?
Yes, if the posts come through Publer or the Linkie API. Each new post appears on the page with its own link, and you can make that the default for every post.
Do we need Publer to do this?
No. Publer is the quickest way, since it publishes the post and sends it to Linkie in one step. Teams that post from somewhere else can connect through the Linkie API with Zapier, Make or n8n.
How do I add a link to a single Instagram post?
You can’t make a caption link clickable. We went through every option that works in how to add a link to an Instagram post.
