Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is almost exclusively tailored to professional connections, which makes it an effective tool to protect and build your brand online. But are you making the most of it? Throughout the years, LinkedIn has made enhancements that transform profiles into powerful branding tools. One such enhancement has been the addition of analytics tools, which can provide meaningful data to help you protect or amplify your personal brand. And, what you learn from spending time with your personal analytics often can be transferred to help you enhance the profile you manage on behalf of your company.
By using the free analytics tools available to “Basic” users of LinkedIn, you can find out what drives views of your profile, where those viewers work and a lot about who they are; all of which can lead to actions that will help you build your personal brand. Just as important, you can apply that same analytics mindset to the brand page you manage on behalf of your company or organization. Outlined below are some ideas for how to maximize your personal LinkedIn analytics, and how to apply what you learn to amplify your company’s brand.
WHAT DRIVES VIEWS
To me, this is the most interesting data to analyze, because it helps identify which actions influence my network the most. Go to your LinkedIn home page. Near the top, you’ll notice a section that says, “X people viewed you in the past day.” Click that link to access a data chart that looks similar to the one below. The first tab—Profile Views—provides insights into what drives views of your profile week-over-week to help you understand how specific actions can impact your activity, both positively and negatively.
You can also review activity for your highest-engagement weeks to determine what drives activity. When I did that, here’s what I found drove views:
- Publishing a blog post: Using LinkedIn’s blog publishing platform, I simply repurposed my posts from my company’s blog, but you can also publish original content
- Joining a group: LinkedIn will even make suggestions to help you find groups most relevant to you
- Adding connections: Interestingly, adding fewer than five connections per week did not drive much activity for me, but adding seven-12 connections had a significant impact on my views
- Sharing status updates: Most notably in the form of sharing interesting articles I read or was quoted in.
With this in mind, I now have a better idea of how to keep my connections engaged, as well as how to leverage articles and blog posts as a way to build influence and thought leadership.
Brand application: Go to the “Analytics” tab on your company profile. Spend some time with the “Updates” section, which will help you understand which content is driving the highest engagement by followers. Look for similarities among those high-engagement pieces and think about them when you share content.
WHERE THEY WORK
Click on the second tab on the chart to see where the people who are viewing your profile work. Are they customers? Colleagues? Competitors? This data will provide insight to help you understand what kind of content you should be sharing on your LinkedIn profile to keep your connections engaged.
By hovering over the “other companies” section of the first chart (“Where your viewers work”) I noted several of my client companies were in the mix, as were some new business prospects. This suggests an opportunity to share best practice or industry trend information with those important stakeholders more passively and allow them to discover the information on their own time, in their own way.
Brand application: In the “Analytics” tab on your corporate page, scroll down to “follower demographics.” This will help you understand the experience and seniority level of most of your visitors, allowing you to better tailor content to reach them.
WHO IS VIEWING YOU?
To take it a step further, study the data in the last tab of the chart, which provided detail into who looked at my profile. While the data itself is anonymous, it still can allow you to build personas around the type of people who are viewing you—both by title and industry. This means you can continue adjusting the type of content you share on your page, or adjust the type of groups you might join to ensure you’re maximizing your impact on the site.
Brand application: In the “Analytics” tab on your corporate page, look at “follower trends,” including how you compare against peer or competitor organizations. If you find your peers are outperforming you, reference LinkedIn’s “grow your fan base” tips to help you build your presence.
LinkedIn analytics can answer a lot of other questions: How you rank as compared to your connections, who among your connections yields the most influence (so you can study and learn from them) and when your published posts garner the most traction. The point is that there is perhaps no better place than LinkedIn to cultivate your personal professional brand, and to use similar analytics tools to boost your company’s LinkedIn presence.
(This post is the second in a series about using data and analytics to improve your social media brand. See PR News, April 27, 2015, for the article on Twitter analytics.)
CONTACT: Lisa Zone is customer communications practice leader at Cleveland-based Dix & Eaton. She can be reached at [email protected]
This article originally appeared in the June 22, 2015 issue of PR News. Read more subscriber-only content by becoming a PR News subscriber today.