Introducing LinkedIn Analytics in 7 Minutes

As Ann Handley has put it:  “LinkedIn is where you can meet up to get work done”. In fact, 50% of B2B sales decision-making happens thanks to LinkedIn. If you want to get some work done over LinkedIn, you have to start setting up successful LinkedIn strategies. How do you get there? You have to check what works precisely for you. That’s when Analytics enter the game. Most people fail to get to the basics of LinkedIn Analytics, even though they are all right there in front of you. This quick post walks you through the essentials without getting too technical. Dive in!

LinkedIn Analytics Part I: Visibility

Think numbers: every month, 106 million unique users visit LinkedIn. These are your potential connections, followers, business partners.

Connections

The count of your LinkedIn profile and company connections

This is your basic LinkedIn contact, probably someone you know personally or connected with previously on some other level. These are people who already want to engage with you at a higher level, rather than passively check your company updates. Value and appreciate their existence!

You should try to expand the number of LinkedIn connections. Leveraging human network will lead to a sort of ripple effect. Deepak Shukla shares his insights/tips on how you can develop your LinkedIn account. Give it a read once you master the basics!

Followers

The total number of LinkedIn members who follow your Company Page.

Followers are there to get your updates/news on their feed. Note: they don’t have to be connected to your account to do so. LinkedIn has users from across  200 countries and territories. Thus, checking your followers’ geography is a great way to target your messages to fit the right audience. You have to post updates and news at an appropriate time. Octoboard has a beautifully designed map that will show you your followers’ geography!

Now when we’ve sorted out how you can differentiate followers from connections, let’s check if you are reaching your audience.

Impressions

The number of times your update is displayed to LinkedIn members

Impressions is a metric you’ll stumble upon every time you measure anything Social Media. Do not confuse the number of impressions with a number of unique readers. If a LinkedIn member (or 1 unique user) sees your post 5 times, you will get 5 impressions. Impressions indicate your visibility, but it is user actions that will help you boost it. 

LinkedIn Analytics Part II: User Actions

LinkedIn is a place, where interaction is hard to get, that’s why every user action is precious. As a company or an individual, you have quite a limited access on LinkedIn. However, once your connections/followers start interacting with your content, you will be reaching a much wider crowd.

LinkedIn user actions: Likes, Comments, Shares, and Clicks.

Likes

The number of times LinkedIn users “Liked”  your content

LinkedIn “Likes” bring in a lot to your table. Whatever content/update a LinkedIn user “likes”, gets instantly displayed on his followers’ feeds. Likes can result in audience expansion for you!

Comments

The number of times LinkedIn users commented on your content

As with “likes”, comments are also displayed on the “commenter’s” LinkedIn feed. His/her followers are your potential audience. A content piece with comments will make it stand out from all the social noise with no interactions.

Shares

The number of times your content is shared by a LinkedIn user

“Shares” are the utmost quality sign for you. LinkedIn is a place where everyone wants to look as “the” professional. Whatever users share, undergoes some serious scrutiny. If you’ve passed that “scrutiny” test, then you are indeed on the right track!

Quality is great. But if you are promoting your blog, website or a published piece (you name it!), what you need to look at are Clicks.

Clicks

The number clicks on a link from your content

The user actions we discussed above – likes, comments, shares – may come from the quality of your content, but can also simply result from your authority. If you are someone’s connection and you studied in college together, here’s your “like”. Whereas clicks indicate that you are either good at copywriting, or maybe image design, and so on.

LinkedIn Analytics Part III: Engagement

The next stage for you is to put all the data together. Once you have your Visibility and User actions figures, you can calculate your LinkedIn Engagement. Even though, we can’t see any reason for you to do the math on your own when Octoboard’s Social Media Dashboard is doing it for you!

Engagement

The number of your Interactions divided by Impressions

E= (Likes + Shares + Comments + Clicks) / Impressions

You need Engagement number in order to compare your content to other pieces you already have data on. In some case, a post with 1000 Impressions and 10 comments will be equal to a post with 10000 Impressions and 10 Likes.

Tip: Another way to use the Engagement metric is for comparison with your competitors. You have various Impressions count, so Engagement will give you a more clear understanding of how you’re doing in relation to your competition.

What’s next?

Now you are all set up for tracking your LinkedIn Analytics and building an efficient LinkedIn strategy. Are you feeling a little overwhelmed? Don’t be, check our LinkedIn dashboard page to see what we can offer for you! You can also directly go to Octoboard’s Social Media Dashboard that will do all the countings for you! Don’t forget, we cover 8+ Social Networks analytics within one magical dashboard!

Log in and check all your analytics metrics across all networks in less than a minute with our Free Social Media Dashboard.