What should an NFC business card link to?

The question that decides it

Not “what is the best link”. The useful question is: thirty seconds after they tap, what do you want to have happened?

If the answer is “we are connected and they can see my background”, that is LinkedIn. If it is “they have seen the work”, that is a portfolio. If it is “my number is in their phone”, that is a contact file. If it is “there is a meeting in the calendar”, that is a booking link. Those are four different destinations and choosing between them by taste rather than by outcome is why so many of these cards end up pointing at a homepage.

The options, and what each is actually good at

Your LinkedIn profile

The right default for most office work. It is already written, it is already current, it carries your history without you having to claim anything, and it has a built-in next action — connecting — which means the tap can lead somewhere without you asking for anything.

Where it fails: if your work is visual, a profile is a poor showcase. If your profile has not been touched in three years, it is actively worse than nothing. And in some trades and some countries the people you hand cards to are simply not on it, in which case you have pointed your card at a sign-up wall.

Your own site, or a page on it

The best answer if you have one and it is current, because it is the only option on this list where you decide what the page says, what it asks for, and whether it still exists next year. Point at a page about you rather than the front door — an about page, a portfolio, a single page with your photograph, what you do and one way to reach you.

Where it fails: an out-of-date personal site is a worse first impression than no site, and a homepage that opens with a hero image and a menu makes the visitor do the work of finding you.

A contact file, so your details save in one tap

Genuinely useful in trades and field work, where the entire point is that your number is in the phone when they need a plumber at eight in the evening. It removes the step where somebody types your name in wrong.

Where it fails: it arrives as a download prompt rather than as a page, which a proportion of people cancel because an unexpected download feels like something to be careful about. It also freezes your details at the moment you made the file — every card handed out before you changed number keeps handing out the old one.

A booking or calendar link

Excellent for one specific job: you are in sales or consulting, the conversation you just had should become a meeting, and the moment to catch it is now. Nothing else on this list converts a handshake into a diary entry.

Where it fails: as a default it is presumptuous. Somebody who took your card politely at a conference is being asked to book time with you before they know whether they want to, and the usual response to that is to close the tab.

A links page

The sensible choice when you really do have two or three destinations of equal weight — a portfolio and a shop, say — and no page of your own that could hold both.

Where it fails: it costs the visitor a decision at exactly the moment they were willing to be led, and a rented page under somebody else’s domain is the thing the next section is about. It is also frequently chosen not because there are three destinations but because choosing one felt hard.

Your company’s homepage

Almost always wrong, and almost always what gets chosen. The person tapped a card with your name on it and landed on a page that does not mention you. Now they have to search the site for a team page, and they will not.

If the company is the point — a shop, a restaurant, a single-person business where you and it are the same thing — then it is not wrong at all. Judge it by whether your name appears on the page they land on.

The mistake worth naming separately

Do not point a card at an address somebody else controls. A company staff page, a marketplace or agency profile, a handle on a platform you might leave. The card is a physical object that outlives all of those, and when the address moves, every card you ever handed out is now a card that opens a 404 — with your name printed on it.

The version of this that catches careful people is the job change. A card pointing at a company’s own “our team” page stops working on the day you resign, and it stops working for the whole stack of them still in your desk drawer.

The defence is to point at something whose address you own, or at a card whose destination you can move — which is the whole reason these cards store an address rather than a page, and a fact that page owns rather than this one.

If you cannot decide

Point it at your LinkedIn profile and get on with your day. It is the option with the fewest ways to be wrong, it needs no work from you, and on a card whose destination can be changed later it is a decision that costs nothing to revisit. The mistake is not picking the second-best destination; the mistake is picking one nobody can find you on.