If you self-host your microblog, I know there’s an automated way of linking @mentions to the person’s micro.blog profile.

However since I also @mention Twitter and Instagram people, I use the following TextExpander snippets instead:

For micro.blog @mentions

Trigger: m:@

[@%filltext:name=User%](http://micro.blog/%filltext:name=User%)

For Twitter @mentions

Trigger: t:@

[@%filltext:name=User%](http://twitter.com/%filltext:name=User%)

For Instagram @mentions

Trigger: i:@

[@%filltext:name=User%](http://www.instagram.com/%filltext:name=User%)

Update:

These snippets, when activated, are supposed to ask you for input on what username you’re trying to link to. There’s an issue if you’re using these snippets on the TextExpander iOS keyboard (as opposed to TextExpander enabled apps like Ulysses or Drafts).

The TextExpander iOS keyboard doesn’t support popups, so you don’t get a chance to input the username you want.

Instead, you’d get an output like this:
[@(User)](http://www.instagram.com/(User))

This means you need to manually change the “User” to whomever you wanted to link to, but the brackets get in the way of quickly double tapping “User” and just replacing it with a name.

I’m afraid that until TextExpander changes the keyboard behaviour (which I’m assuming is being controlled by Apple), there are only two work-arounds:

1. Use TextExpander enabled apps like Drafts or Ulysses to draft out your post.
2. Create snippets that doesn’t have the brackets, so you can replace “User” quickly on iOS devices, like the following:
   [@User](http://micro.blog/User)

Let me know how you go with this, or if you have other ways of doing this. I would love to find other workarounds for this issue.