How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 1

The Beginner’s Guide

As a working professional, you’re most likely active on LinkedIn, and as a brand, your business should be too. LinkedIn offers a number of opportunities for brands, whether it be for lead generation purposes, direct sales, prospecting or more, take a look at our article set on how LinkedIn can benefit your business efforts by beginning with “What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”, or go through our LinkedIn resources made available at the end of this article.

As with all business efforts, you need to be able to measure your efforts in order to determine how they impact your bottom line. However, many brands are still unsure of how they can accurately track and measure their efforts on social platforms like LinkedIn. It is for this reason that I’ve compiled an article series focusing solely on guiding you on successfully tracking in LinkedIn.

“Any job that’s not in sales — any job where I can’t help create value and make a difference for a client — would be a nightmare job for me.” — Anthony Iannarino ( Author at thesalesblog.com) @iannarino

In this article, I will cover…

#1 What Is Measuring Success On LinkedIn?

#2 Why Should You Care About Measuring Success On LinkedIn?

#3 How Can Measuring Success On LinkedIn Help You Hit Your Company’s Revenue Targets?

#4 What Should You Watch out For When Measuring Success On LinkedIn?

Let’s get going…

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#1 What Is Measuring Success On LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a powerful search engine where you can establish and build awareness of your professional expertise, as well as your brand, and can help you connect with colleagues and potential business partners. More than that, LinkedIn is a powerful inbound marketing tool to put yourself out there for all the business world to see. And it’s not just corporations and job seekers on LinkedIn anymore. Whatever your business, your target audience is likely to be there, participating in group discussions, searching for opportunities, sharing value. So if you want more exposure, don’t neglect LinkedIn.

So your brand is on LinkedIn, but is it really worth your time? Are you using the platform in a way that drives real results for your business? Well, the easiest way to determine this is to track and measure your efforts on LinkedIn. More than 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, not to mention the possible leads you could gain from the platform if you’re in the B2C space — it is the leading platform for professionals looking to make new connections within their industries — and as such, your brand needs to know how to come out on top.

In this article series, I will introduce you to some of the most common metrics that brands and the individuals associated with them use to track their levels of success on the platform, and guide you through the ways that these can help you more accurately report on LinkedIn’s impact on your business goals.

#2 Why Should You Care About Measuring Success On LinkedIn?

The beauty of social media platforms, is that you are able to easily measure your efforts on them, whether by using their built-in analytics dashboard, or third-party analytics software like Google Analytics. But how do you know which metrics you should be measuring to track your business goals on a site like LinkedIn? Below I will take you through some of the metrics you can use to monitor your personal and business efforts on the platform.

Here Are Some Basic “Input” Metrics You Can Track Using Your LinkedIn Page

• Network Size Or Total Connections — You can quickly see your number of connections and network size on your home page by clicking the ‘connections’ tab. Growing your network will help you grow your influence and visibility on LinkedIn.
• Level Of New Invitations — Counting the amount of new invitations is a good way of tracking that your network is continuing to grow. If you get a good level of new invitation every week then you know that you are growing your influence and potential value from your LinkedIn activities. Again, you can use the LinkedIn system to give you this information by clicking on the ‘Your LinkedIn Statistics’ tab and clicking on the ‘new people’ hyperlink.
• LinkedIn Profile Views — Another statistic LinkedIn will provide you is the number of people who have accessed your LinkedIn profile in the last week. Keeping an eye on these stats will give you a good idea of your growing LinkedIn presence. If you have upgraded to the premium account you will not only get the number of views but even their names, job titles, and industry — which makes it even more powerful.

Even though the above ‘input’ measures will give you some initial insights, their values are limited. Slightly more sophisticated are ‘engagement’ metrics that look at interactions and level of engagement.

Here Are Some Engagement Metrics You Can Track Using Your LinkedIn Page

• Level Of Interactions — A great way to build a presence of LinkedIn is to write regular updates and a test of whether these updates are relevant and useful to your community and network is to look at the number of likes you get and the number of comments your posts generate. A nice way to boost your interactions is to join relevant groups on LinkedIn and post questions and comments on discussion threads. Potential employers and business customer will look for influential people in their industry and the level of interaction is a good measure of such influence.
• Endorsed Skills — On LinkedIn you can list the skills you believe you have. What is powerful is that members of your network can now endorse or ‘confirm’ those skills. This is a powerful way of getting endorsements for your claims and recruiters are paying increasing amounts of attention to these endorsed skills. It is therefore a good idea to encourage and remind people in your network to endorse your skills.
• Total Number Of Recommendations — An even more powerful way of assessing your influence and level of endorsement from others is the number of recommendations you have. Other LinkedIn members have the ability to write a recommendation about you. You can also use a function within LinkedIn to asked individuals in your network to recommend you. It is therefore a great idea to get into the routine of asking existing and past employers, colleagues or customers to write recommendations. Only for the fact that potential employers or customers will surely take note of any recommendations.

Measures of engagement are more insightful than the simple input measures but even engagement metrics should not be confused with ‘outcome’ measures. Outcome measures track the ultimate success of your LinkedIn activities and provide you with the definitive insights of your LinkedIn success. While it is great to grow your network and even better to engage with your contacts, the final goal is to either generate new and better job offers or to generate new business. Unless this is happening, your LinkedIn activities are still questionable.

Here Are Some Success Indicators You Can Find Using Your LinkedIn Page

• Total Number Of Business Leads — If you are on LinkedIn to generate new business then measuring the number (and quality) of leads generated is essential. Simply keep track on how many requests for business you have had and make sure you validate the requests by establishing the value of these request in terms of potential revenue or quality of leads. You don’t want to generate a great number of sub-quality leads or requests for ‘free’ advice. The number of real business leads is a great start but the number of quality and validated business leads is even better.
• Number Of Job Offers — If you are on LinkedIn to improve your career and attract new job offers than this is what you should be tracking: How many job offers have you received? However, similarly to the business leads, it is useful to qualify the job offers you are receiving — are they the stepping stone offers you are hoping for or are they sub-quality job offers for you to move sideways?

The above set of ‘input, engagement and outcome’ metrics are a great starting point to better understand the return on investment you are getting from your LinkedIn activities. However, there are other social media indicators such as online share of voice, social networking footprint, or influence measures such as the Klout Score, etc that you can track to gauge your performance on the network.

Each effort you make on a site like LinkedIn, whether it be on your brand’s company page, or on your personal page, has a direct impact on how potential customers and connections see you, which in turn can have an impact on your bottom line. For this reason you should definitely care about measuring your efforts on LinkedIn, to justify whether or not the site is working to help you meet your business goals.

#3 How Can Measuring Success On LinkedIn Help You Hit Your Company’s Revenue Targets?

To help you get an idea of which metrics will impact your business reporting, I’ve compiled an article dedicated to the platform-specific analytics tool that LinkedIn provides for brands with a Company Page on its site, in order to help you familiarize yourself with the various metrics available to you on the platform, to guide you on which would be the best fit for your business reporting model. I will also take you through the ins and outs of vanity metrics, to help you decide when and why you should report on them, and when you should dive in a little deeper to gauge your performance. The next article in this series, “How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, will take you through these.

See how brands like Holiday Inn used LinkedIn to reach their audiences using humor by reading their success story here.

#4 What Should You Watch out For When Measuring Success On LinkedIn?

As I keep saying, it is imperative that you and your team be aware of the mistakes that brands have made in their sales and marketing efforts, to help you avoid making them yourself. The third article in this series will take you through some of these, to help guide your measurement and reporting efforts for LinkedIn. Be sure to read “How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)” to enlighten you on what mistakes you should avoid making when measuring your efforts on the platform in relation to your business goals.

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While it is important to understand the basic metrics for measurement, you also need to understand when you should be reporting on them, and when you shouldn’t be. So take a read through the next article in his series, “How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, now.

LinkedIn Resources

What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)

What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)

What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)

How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)

How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)

How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)