How to use LinkedIn analytics?

As the leading social network for the B2B sector, LinkedIn can be a great marketing channel to build your brand. Still, only the proper and in-depth analysis of the statistics the platform provides can make it happen. It’s impossible to create engaging content without knowing exactly what resonates with the segments of your target audience you care about. Fortunately, LinkedIn provides many types of metrics that we can use.

LinkedIn analytics – table of contents:

The Goals

How do you read the basic data that LinkedIn provides?

What to look out for?

The Goals

But before we get to the tools, it’s necessary to define the goals we care about achieving:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of the published content, it is worth analyzing the engagement of the audience. In this way, you can abstract the articles that evoke the desired reactions expressed by clicks, shares, likes and comments.
• To stay ahead of users’ expectations, you can also use data to define trends. This way, you can determine when posts of a given type trigger the most engagement and arrange your publishing schedule to fall into your audience’s schedule.
• To tailor your platform marketing efforts to key decision-makers, digging into detailed demographic data about them. Why should you? If you’re a global marketer, for example, you can see what region your followers are from and deliver content personalized for the most promising markets to talk about things that concern them. If your product is dedicated to small and medium-sized businesses, you can use a so-called size filter to determine if you’re reaching this particular audience. In short, understanding who your followers are will help you deliver content that relates to them.
• To assess whether your actions are progressing quickly enough, it’s also worth comparing your growth with that of similar brands and learning from the best.

However, the most important thing is to be aware of the purposefulness of the actions you take. The people who observe your brand are always more likely to eventually convert into customers than those who are not aware of your existence at all. Developing a community should therefore serve to generate leads and consequently translate into sales.

How do you read the basic data that LinkedIn provides?

To access your LinkedIn analytics dashboard, go to the toolbar at the top of your company page, where you will see three tabs:

Company Page

The company page is – just like on Facebook – the main space of your activity, where basic information about the company, such as profile picture and banner (background photo), description of the business and all posts are placed.

The company website provides an internal dashboard where you can find data on:

1. User counts (i.e., people who are not observers of a page but visited it anyway);
2. View counts (shows how many people have viewed your updates on LinkedIn);
3. Follower counts (that is, the number of people who are your “fans”).

This information, while showing you what was happening in a previous location, is not a basis for trending because it aggregates data from too short a period. To get deeper, you need to click on the Analytics menu.

Activity

Under the “activity” tab you will find information on:

• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Mentions (the places where your brand name appears in online conversations)

User activity information gives you more qualitative data about your activities on LinkedIn. You’ll learn what users think about your content and, if you aggregate and analyze data over a longer period, what they expect.

Analytics

This is the main platform that allows you to monitor statistics. It aggregates three types of data:

1. Users or data about the people who visit your site,
2. Updates or engagement metrics for content published on LinkedIn;
3. Followers, which is numerical and demographic information about the people who subscribe to your site.

They are presented in five different demographic categories:

• Location
• Position
• Seniority
• Industry
• Company size

Knowing your demographics is extremely important when marketing on LinkedIn, as it allows you to shape your strategy to more effectively reach the right people. Keep in mind that only personalized content has a chance of engaging the audience you care about.

What to look out for?

Here it’s hard to answer other than the hated “it depends”, but unfortunately – it really depends on your goals. If you’re planning to hold an event in a particular location, you should check your visitors and subscribers pages to see if you can get enough interest in that city. If you want to build an expert brand and attract as many users to your content as possible, focus on the quality of your content and look at the data in terms of audience engagement to see which are most popular and analyze demographics.

LinkedIn, while like any social media platform, wants to keep users “at home” for as long as possible, it also allows you to redirect users to external sites. However, if we decide to do so, we must remember to mark the redirection with a code that will allow analytical systems to accurately attribute the source of traffic. The easiest way to do this is to use UTM, i.e. to “stick” a few parameters to the link from LinkedIn, which will inform about where the user came from.

Read more about using LinkedIn for business marketing.

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