Do you have a Company Page on LinkedIn for your brand and business? If not, stop reading and use this guide to take care of that first.
Back already? Ok. Now that you have a LinkedIn Company Page, that means you have a home for your business on LinkedIn. One of benefits of having a Company Page is that you can share Status Updates. Just like your personal LinkedIn account, and any other social network, status updates can include something about you or your business, an article you’ve written, or an article someone else has written that you want to share. On LinkedIn, those status updates can even include files and video and SlideShare presentations.
After you’ve been sharing updates for a while and have attracted some followers to your Company Page, you’re going to want to start paying attention to the analytics that LinkedIn provides. These are called Insights, just like on Facebook Pages. LinkedIn actually provides three sets of statistics: Per Post, Follower and Page.
Per Post Insights
Per Post Insights are specific to each status update. Simply go to your Company Page and scroll down through your previous updates. Below each update, you will see information detailing how many followers viewed that post, how many times it was clicked, and what that percentage is in regard to engagement.
For example, here’s a post from a few days ago to The Social Media Hat on LinkedIn. This post was one of our articles and as you can see, the post received 29 impressions, 4 clicks, and a result of 13.79% engagement. The engagement percentage is based completely on the ratio of clicks to impressions. So while the information does not tell you how many followers you had at that time (we had 78-80 at the time of that post), the engagement metric is unrelated to the number of Company Page followers.
Also note that the update states “Shared with all followers.” If you create a status update and choose to target specific follower demographics, this will be reflected in that line.
Follower Insights
To the right of the status update field, you will see a link to get to Follower Insights. The Follower Insights page provides an extensive look at not only how many followers you page has, but your growth and engagement rates, and demographic information about your followers.
At A Glance
The report quickly illustrates how many followers your page has and how many have been added within the last 7 days. It goes on to tell you how many impressions your page has received total, and your average impressions per status update. You can review how many updates you’ve shared within the last week, and your average engagement per update as well.
Company Update Engagement
Below that, is a useful graph called Company Update Engagement. This graph demonstrates how your company page has done month-to-month.
As you can see, the graph demonstrates how many clicks, comments, likes, shares and average engagement for each month. It shows 6 months at a time so if your page is older than six months, use the navigation arrows just below the graph to scroll back and forth.
Follower Demographics
The Follower Demographic is an example of where LinkedIn really shines.
Broken into tabs for Seniority, Industry, Function, Region, Company Size and Employee, you can see exactly what kinds of people are following your brand. These segments are also similar to the options you have when choosing to target new status updates.
Company Update Impressions
This simply demonstrates the total number of impressions for all your status updates, per month. As with any monthly statistic, you have to ignore the current month since the numbers will be incomplete. And since total impressions is a factor of both your number of followers and your number of posts per month, this graph does not seem to provide much value.
Recent Followers
The Recent Followers area lets you know specifically who has followed your company recently, providing their name, title, profile image, geographic location and their connection to you personally (1st degree, etc.).
Members Following & New Followers
Members Following and New Followers both display how your Company Page followers have grown month-to-month, simply shown in different graph styles.
Obviously you want to see not only growth in the number of followers, but increasing levels of growth each month.
Analysis
So what can we distill from the information LinkedIn is providing here?
First, you can see how effective your efforts to promote your Company Page have been. Are you regularly adding new followers, or not? Have you done anything recently to recommend people follow your page, and if so, what were the results?
Second, you can take a closer look at the people who are actually following you. Are they the kinds of LinkedIn users that, frankly, you want to target for your business? If so, then continue to do what you’re doing. If not, then you may need to reevaluate the content that you’re sharing, frequency, or how you’re promoting your LinkedIn Company Page.
Page Insights
Your Page Insights is about the visits and activity on your page, regardless of whether or not the visitor was already a follower.
It starts with how many page views you’ve received you received in the past week, as well as percentage comparison to the previous week. It then illustrates how many unique visitors and how many page clicks.
Page Views
The Page Views graph gives you a great sense of how much traffic your LinkedIn Company Page gets on a month-to-month basis. You can tab between the entire company page, or just your Career or Products & Services sections (if you have them).
Like any website, your hope is that page views will increase each and every month.
Page Visitor Demographics
Just like the Follower Demographics chart, your Page Visitor Demographics will illustrate for you the kinds of people who are viewing your Company Page and where they come from.
One interesting exercise for businesses would be to dig into the demographics of Followers and Visitors and compare them, as well as Page Views compared to New Followers. You will always have far more people who view your page than follow it, but that ratio, and the demographics of those followers, is something you should hope to improve.
For instance, in February and March The Social Media Hat received about 100 views a month. In February there were 18 new followers but in March, with about the same number of views, there were 33 new followers. We can then go back and compare the status updates posted in February to the ones post in March and look for differences and improvements to emulate in the future.
Unique Visitors
This graph simply illustrates how many unique visitors you’ve had each month.
Products & Services Page: Clicks
Out of all of your page clicks, this graph shows you how many clicks were for your Products & Services Page.
Careers Page: Clicks
Out of all of your page clicks, this graph shows you how many clicks were for your Careers Page.
Note:all statistics are reflective through the previous day.
Analysis
As mentioned above, these statistics can really help you identify not only how many new followers you’re gaining each month, but what kinds of followers you’re gaining and whether or not the things that you’re doing to promote your page are working.
The nice thing about LinkedIn Insights is that the information is presented in easy to digest graphs that take just moments to digest. Anyone from the CEO and business owner to the social media manager or agency can regularly review these analytics and pull relevant information from them.
Reviewing them regularly though is the key. If you wait until March to review how you did in December, you certainly aren’t going to remember anything special that you did four months ago and you’re going to have to do some digging to determine what you posted, where you promoted the Company Page, and so on.
A quick note about LinkedIn Company Page promotion…
I mentioned several times that you can and should be promoting your Company Page. While LinkedIn does not currently allow Company Pages to participate in discussions, there are a number of ways that you can promote your page, including:
- Display a link or icon to your LinkedIn Company Page on your website
- Include a link or icon in your email signature
- Occasionally promote the Company Page on Facebook, Twitter and Google+
- Send a note to other LinkedIn members who fit your customer profile
- Maintain your own LinkedIn Group and occasionally promote your Company Page
- Mention your Company in LinkedIn Status Updates where appropriate
Try some of these and make a note of what you did and when, so that you can review your results the following month and see if your activities were effective.
If you have any questions at all about LinkedIn Company Page Insights or LinkedIn in general, please feel free to ask in the comments below.
Image courtesy of Boston Public Library, Flickr.
