LinkedIn product

New Analytics for Publishing on LinkedIn: See Who’s Viewed Your Published Post

If you’re publishing on LinkedIn, you’re already sharing your insights and positioning yourself as a thought leader with the largest group of professionals assembled on the web. With more than
360 million profiles, LinkedIn is the place you want to be to share your expertise and to discuss issues that matter to you with other like-minded professionals. But, how do you know what is resonating and who is listening to what you have to say? How are you reaching them?

Today we’re excited to introduce analytics for publishing on LinkedIn as a new way to answer these questions. Analytics for publishing on LinkedIn provides insights into who’s reading and engaging with your posts. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to evaluate whether you’re reaching the right audience, which posts are resonating with readers, and more. In fact, rather than hearing from us on why we believe analytics for publishing on LinkedIn can offer unique and helpful insights as you plan your next post, we thought we’d let one of our members, David Petherick, tell you how he's using it and why he's excited about it.

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LinkedIn Unveils Analytics for Publishing on LinkedIn
By David Petherick

LinkedIn has started to roll out full analytics and statistics on your posts made on its publishing platform. (To see if you've got access to your analytics yet, click here.)

If you don't yet have access to your stats, or are not yet writing on LinkedIn, take a look at some of the analytics data available based on some of my recent posts:
Performance
First, you can choose any of your past posts to look at, with stats going back up to 6 months on the view graph (although data is held for older posts). You can mouse over specific days to get the actual viewing figure, and can of course see patterns for evergreen content, or when you have shared into a group, see how it brings figures back up for an older post.

You can see a performance summary of views, likes, comments and shares, and scrolling further down the page, see which LinkedIn members have viewed, liked, commented and shared - a great way to say thanks, and to note who's being generous with their love for your work.

Demographics
The demographics element further down the page provides fascinating insight - although the demographics don't cover every viewer, only logged in LinkedIn members - you can see what kind of audience is looking at your work.

Looking closely above, I never knew I was so popular in Oregon, but I can see for the post detailed that the main traffic came from sharing the article in groups, with only a relatively small boost coming from being featured on the LinkedIn Pulse channel 'LinkedIn Tips'. On other posts, being featured in LinkedIn Pulse has been the main driver.

For older articles, my traffic has come largely from Google Search as shown below - which is another good reason I choose headlines with care and ensure I use language and terms I want to be associated with SEO 101.

Demographics - Specific
For the last illustration here, I can see exactly who has commented on a specific post, and can visit their profile, or if they are already in my network, send a message directly from the analytics page.

I got a lot of traffic from Paris here, because I was writing about an issue to do with French law. Quite why it fascinated so many people in Chicago, I can only guess - but knowing who shared on other articles lets me see who perhaps I should connect with in future.

All of this provides me with useful and actionable information:

1.    I can see the audience I am reaching by industry, location and even job title, and see if it aligns with who I am trying to reach
2.    I can see where traffic is being driven from and see where I can try to stimulate more traffic
3.    I can see patterns of visit behavior, and act to share further when traffic starts to tail off
4.    I can engage with and thank the people who have read, liked, commented on or shared my work easily
Thanks for the new feature to enhance LinkedIn Publishing, LinkedIn!

What interesting insights or surprises have you discovered from looking at your analytics? Please share in the comments of David’s original post.