If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ll remember that I delved into the ‘exciting’ world Facebook Analytics a couple of months ago. The series will continue to cover the other platforms (if you’re still interested), but today it’s the turn of LinkedIn.
Love it or hate it, LinkedIn is a great tool for reaching a business audience. You’ll find, on the whole, that engagement is generally lower than some of the other platforms. Don’t be disheartened though as there are definitely still ‘lurkers‘ out there and your content is being seen.
There are two ways to find out whether you are getting any engagement. The easy one is to login once in a while and check on your posts, which any good social media user should do as a matter of course. The more interesting way is to check your analytics every now and then as well.
This second option of checking your analytics has the added bonus of giving you an insight into when best to post in the future. In general on LinkedIn it’s just before or after business hours and at lunch time. Unless you’re targeting one of the lucky ones like us, who gets to be on social media ALL DAY, that’s when your audience will be most active.
So, how does it work?
That depends on whether you have a company page or simply a personal profile. We’ll start with company pages for now.
You may think they are a pointless waste of time, but could well be one of the first ports of call for your clients. At the very least they should be optimised with a cover image and links to your team members.
Better still there should be regular posts. Two to three a week is optimum in our experience and Tuesday through Thursday are the best days. Think about it, how busy are you on a Monday and what about that Friday feeling??
To navigate to your LinkedIn Company Page, you’ll need to be an admin (no you don’t get a badge, I’m still asking). Click on the little arrow where it says ‘Me’ under your picture in the black banner at the top (see screenshot above) and scroll down to the bottom of the dropdown. Any admin can post to the page so you don’t need to be the only one.
Come on get to the point
All right, once there you’ll find yourself automatically in ‘Admin View’. I may cover the need for ‘Member View’ later if you’re still with me.
The bit we really want today is ‘Analytics’, don’t shudder it’s not scary at all! Here you’ll find the following headings:
- Visitors – gives you metric (desktop vs mobile views) and demographic (job type of your viewers) info
- Updates – shows metrics relating to impressions, clicks and other engagement as well as detail for each individual post
- Followers – you guessed it, metrics about your followers including location and most ‘excitingly’ the companies they work for! Follow them, follow them all AND engage with their posts.
Apart from doing what I’ve said above, you can ignore Followers and Visitors for now. Updates is the most useful if you have limited time.
As you can see from this snippet (get your magnifying glass out, or maximise the page), several of our team post at regular intervals. Esther is winning, with Janet a close second on ‘Impressions’. Alex is new so we’ll give him a pass. Seriously though, it’s not a competition, they can and are all learning from each other all the time.
You can also clearly see that the engagement (likes, comments etc) have no real bearing on the impressions as Janet is way ahead on those. See, ‘lurkers’, they’re everywhere.
Anyway, if you want to find out more about when and what to post in the future you’ll need to do a bit more digging I’m afraid. LinkedIn doesn’t give it to you on a plate. Basically it involves clicking on each post and getting your calendar out. It doesn’t take long if you do it regularly though and could mean the difference between first and last with your colleagues! #NotCompetitiveAtAll