3 Key Metrics for Determining Your LinkedIn Profile Success

Measuring Metrics on LinkedIn Will Increase Your Audience Engagement

If you’ve ever wondered what the point of engaging on LinkedIn might be, or how to determine the success of your profile, you might consider evaluating the metrics that LinkedIn provides. The following are 3 key metrics you can use to evaluate the success of your LinkedIn profile.
The breadth of your connections on LinkedIn is a good metric to evaluate, because you can see it grow as you engage on the social media platform. When you sign up for LinkedIn you have zero connections, and, depending on your strategy for engaging and building your online network, you can have 100 connections, 500 connections, or thousands–up to 30,000 total.

1. The number of connections you have.

Strategic Choices for Growing Your LinkedIn Network

Your LinkedIn connection strategy will determine the growth of your LinkedIn profile. Some people choose to guard their first-degree connections closely, only connecting with or accepting connections from people they know well. Taking the opposite view, some choose to become LinkedIn LIONS (LinkedIn Open Networkers), accepting and seeking connections from anyone willing to introduce themselves.

Benefits of Measuring Your LinkedIn Network Growth

Of course, the benefit of growing your first-degree connection list is you have resources on whom you can call for information when you are engaging in all types of business activities, not the least of which is executive job search

The bigger benefit for you as you seek to advance your career is the exponential growth of second- and third-degree connections. These are the connections of your connections, perhaps individuals you’d never have the chance to meet otherwise, and they can serve as invaluable sources of insider information as you determine your career objectives, target companies, and executive job search strategy.

2. The number of times your profile has been viewed.

The number of times your profile has been viewed is a good proxy for the success of the level of your engagement on LinkedIn. In other words, when people read your updates, and they find your updates compelling, they’ll click through your name to read your profile. Also, if your LinkedIn profile is well-populated with strategic keywords, you will start to earn profile click-throughs because your message resonates with the needs of hiring executives and recruiters.

Strategic Choices to Increase the Number of Your Profile Views

You can strategically increase your profile views in two key ways. First, start sharing updates more frequently. These can be your own posts in the form of microblogging or from your regular blog. These generally are thought-provoking statements or questions about your industry or your knowledge about it. On the other hand, you can be a content curator and repost, “like,” share, or comment on what other people have posted or published elsewhere. You don’t have to be clever and original all the time–you simply have to commit to engaging your audience.

Benefits of Measuring the Number of Your Profile Views

It’s beneficial to keep track of your profile views from week to week. It serves as an excellent measurement of your ability to engage well on a day-to-day basis. Generally, the more you post, share, and “like,” the more people will come to expect a certain perspective or point of view from you related to your industry or executive position. Consequently, these people will start to feel like they “know” you, want to learn more about you, view your profile, and, hopefully, engage with you in real time, which can only benefit you both.

3. The number of times your updates have been viewed.

The “Who’s Viewed Your Updates” metric is one that LinkedIn has recently added. The report is located on the lower right of your LinkedIn home screen, and it tells you several important things. First, it reminds you of the number of times you’ve posted recently and when you’ve done it. Much like a slide show, you can click through your update history, and when you do, you’ll get a Venn diagram-like image of the number of times your update has been viewed and liked by your first, second, and third-degree connections. If you click through beyond your most distant update, you’ll get a total number of views.

Strategic Choices for Increasing the Number of Times Your Updates Have Been Viewed

Again, the solution to increasing the number of views of individual updates depends on the value your audience sees in your content. More to the point, you can evaluate the level of interest of your audience in the topics and positioning of your updates.

Benefits of Measuring the Number of Times Your Updates Have Been Viewed

The benefit of monitoring this particular metric is that you can strategically include similar types of updates for posts that get many views for more views overall. The flip side is that you can decide whether you want to keep posting updates that have seemingly small impact based on your intentionality–or stop posting updates similar to those altogether. At the moment, you cannot view the individuals who have viewed your updates, so this metric represents a simple aggregate value, so it will be interesting to see in the future what information LinkedIn chooses to include for people interested in drilling into the data.

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