Success on LinkedIn depends on the goals set and on how your market yourself. For many, LinkedIn is used as an electronic business card. But it can be much more than that. The possibilities include:
- Growing your network of business contacts
- Being seen as an expert in your chosen field
- Engaging with your ideal clients
- Marketing to like-minded business people
- Generating sales leads
- Locating a new business to partner
- Making a career move
It is therefore, important that you regularly monitor the performance of your LinkedIn activities as you gear up to optimise the networking cum business opportunities on LinkedIn. But, what to measure?
Fortunately, LinkedIn makes this relatively easy. When you are looking to expand your influence and impact on LinkedIn, these are the metrics to keep an eye on:
1. Connection Requests by Yourself to Others
First-tier connections are the people you are connected with directly, but if you take their network and the networks of professionals that you are connected to in various groups that you are a member of, your LinkedIn network will grow substantially.
It is one of the most important metrics to monitor. You should always keep in mind that quality always trumps quantity. However, if you can grow your network organically by interacting with other professionals and through genuine connections, your LinkedIn network will grow too.
2. The Number of Connections
The size of your (quality) network matters a lot if you wish to rank well on LinkedIn. Some people even say that it is all about who you know and who they know. Every new connection increases the overall size of your network and how successful (or not) your LinkedIn profile becomes. The more active you are on LinkedIn the higher the invitations you will most likely receive and the higher the chance of growing your network.
3. The Number of Followers
Followers are the people that follow your content without being a connection. If you consistently post updates and articles, the number of followers should be on the rise. The number of followers you have is an excellent way to evaluate the impact of the content that you are posting.
4. Responses to Articles and Posts
Here I'm talking about comments, likes, views, and shares. Whether you publish content in the form of posts and/or articles, finding out how your content is performing is critical to the success of your LinkedIn profile. Take a look at the type of content that people are engaging with more. For me, the main metric to watch is comments as you then have a chance to engage.
The responses metric is good one to keep your eyes on, since it helps you tell which topics people are interested in so that you can offer more of it. Conversely, you can also tell what topics are less popular. You can then stop creating or at least reduce, the number of posts/articles on these less popular topics.
Final Thoughts
A successful LinkedIn profile is one where you have set yourself a goal or two, are active on LinkedIn and are keeping tabs on the success of your profile and associated activities. Of course, the ultimate metric to measure is the number of business requests arising from your LinkedIn activities.
Note. Click here to see the set of personal profile metrics that are worth while keeping an eye on as well.
Profile Review
We have developed a LinkedIn Profile Review that is aimed at those who are currently looking to make the most of their LinkedIn profile - even if it’s only “1/2” complete.
The Review looks at your public profile to see where you are making use of ‘best practice’ techniques and to discover any roadblocks to having an outstanding profile.
All we need, is the LinkedIn generated PDF of your profile