Linkedin is so important to all of us, but what value is the professional networking site truly bringing to you and your firm?
Built within Linkedin is some useful analytics functionality where you can measure the performance of your company page and content marketing efforts.
Just click on the Analytics tab from your company page admin area and you’ll see there are 3 reporting categories: visitors, updates and followers. Just a cursory glance at each of these and you’ll start to glean some interesting intel. But by digging a little deeper and you’ll see you’re able to access some extremely granular data, data that you can use to enhance your marketing efforts.
The metrics you need to track
Visitors
Simply put, this is data about people. Visitor analytics will show you how many visitors have come to your page and engaged with your content. The visitor demographics metrics are incredibly useful for informing the content of upcoming posts and ad targeting; they provide intel including job function, industry, location, seniority and company size. The visitor’s tab will also tell you how visitors are accessing your site (phone, tablet or desktop) as well as important intel such as which pages receive the most traffic. And it’s not just for the current month, you can look back over the 12 months, to really identify some interesting trends.
Updates
The updates section offers information on how well – or not – your content is performing. Check out the Update Highlights for valuable metrics that track the level of interaction for all of your content. It’ll show you what kind of reaction you are getting. Comments, likes, and shares are all shown here so you can closely track your content’s performance. Are certain types of posts performing better than others?
Followers
This section will give you the numerical and demographic information about the people subscribing to your page. Follower numbers are an important long-term metric to track – high follower numbers can add credibility to your firm. The Follower Demographics is also a useful metric to track. This section will allow you to break down the characteristics of your followers into categories such as location, job function, seniority, industry and company size. Understanding who your followers are, where they are, and what they do will ensure you are creating relevant content. An exciting recent addition to this section is that you now have the ability to actually see who your followers are and in what month they started following you. Not knowing who was actually following a company page had become a frustration for many, so it’s great Linkedin have finally added this functionality.
How to Make the Most of LinkedIn Metrics
Once you have familiarised yourself with the LinkedIn analytics you can use them to truly optimise your page.
Optimise Your Content Strategy
The best way to discover what kinds of content your followers engage with is by regularly monitoring your page updates. Update metrics such as engagement, impressions, clicks and shares will tell you how well your post are performing, giving you the opportunity to A/B test content topics and formats.
The visitor and follower demographics will offer some insight into what topics are relevant to your audience. For instance, if you can see that a large percentage of your followers are from a certain industry and over a certain company size, you can adjust your messaging accordingly.
Analyse the Performance of Marketing Campaigns
Tracking your LinkedIn metrics offers valuable insight into campaign effectiveness. When you run certain campaigns are certain peaks occurring in your analytics.
Conversely, if a campaign isn’t getting the desired results, your analytics could provide useful intel in where you need to make changes.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
The followers section not only gives you interesting insight into your followers, but it also allows you to compare your performance metrics against those of your competitors.
If your competitors are beginning to outperform you, take a look at their posts to discover what’s working well for them. You might be able to glean some useful insights.
These are just the basics of Linkedin analytics. There is so much more you can, particularly when you have your Linkedin integrated with your marketing automation platform, but just maximising the basics will give you a solid foundation in which to ensure your Linkedin marketing is effective. For any advice on Linkedin marketing, please do not hesitate to get in touch.