Analyze Your Analytics to Enhance Your LinkedIn Updates

Do you want to attract more views, likes, comments and shares of your LinkedIn posts? Do you want to increase your engagement with your network and beyond?

Of course you do. And to do that, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Then you can create a hypothesis about why, and test it.

You can check out the analytics for your posts, also known as sharing an update, to see what content is resonating with your network.

There you’ll see the number of views, along with your viewers’ main employers, predominant titles and geographic locations.

Being a week into my month-long experiment of posting to LinkedIn every weekday, I turned to the analytics to see what I could learn.

Defining engagement broadly as a combination of views, likes, comments and shares, three types of posts rise to the top.

A view of a post is defined as someone seeing your post in their LinkedIn homepage feed. (Views are defined differently for articles, which will be a future blog post topic.)

Career strategies. My most-viewed posts were links to articles with career advice – including the biggest predictor of career success and LinkedIn profile updates for every career stage.

Given this blog’s focus on social media savvy for corporate professionals, I’ll keep an eye out for articles with career strategies that make use of social media.

Big news about the company. My fellow colleagues were understandably as proud as I was to see our company named to Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017, as well as being named the #1 telecom globally in Fortune’s most admired companies.

(This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed here are my own.)

For upcoming posts, I’ll keep my eye out for milestone news and events to share about my employer. This is where an employee advocacy program is incredibly valuable.

Leadership quotes and eye-catching photos for major holidays. This one surprised me. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving, I posted a beautiful picture from iStockPhoto along with a related leadership quote.

These turned out to be some of my most engaging posts. I’ll definitely add more of these to my editorial calendar. If I hadn’t looked at the analytics, this would have been a missed opportunity.

One thing I haven’t yet found in LinkedIn or through my research is an aggregated set of analytics. I’m creating an Excel spreadsheet to consolidate the analytics for this month’s posts.

It will include:

  • Post title
  • Post or article
  • Content type
  • Date
  • Day of the week
  • Time of day
  • Views
  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Shares
  • Employers
  • Titles
  • Geographic locations
  • First- or second-degree networks
  • Hypothesis about performance
  • Action indicated by the hypothesis

Then I’ll have greater insight at the end of the month to see how to develop and execute an editorial calendar going forward.

What posts get the greatest engagement with your network?

And how do you use analytics to amp up engagement with your posts?