In March 2022, LinkedIn announced new creator analytics, including improved post analytics and new video tools, with analytics and prompts on what to share. They also provided a subscribe function to get new content alerts on the topics users want, and a place for marketers to feature their newsletter and get more subscribers.
Now, in December of the same year, they’ve made even more improvements to their creator analytics. But what are they and what can they do for you?
What metrics were improved?
1) Demographics
Take a look at your Audience tab now and you’ll find a section on follower growth. Tucked under that is a whole new set of demographic information breaking down details of the people in your audience. You can now see their location, company name and size, what industries they are in, how senior they are, and their job titles.
2) Audience Growth
Again, under the audience tab, you now have insights into how many followers you have, if your audience is growing, and by how much in the past seven days. This shows you your long-term performance, as well as that particular week.
With a handy graph to indicate progress, you should be able to relate any spikes in growth back to new posts or anything new you’ve tried, like introducing videos or a new topic.
3) Top Performing Posts
Initially, you’ll be able to see your three top performing posts, but you can click “Show More” to see a list of all of your posts in performance order. This module shows reader reactions, how many comments you have, and how many impressions for each article.
You can choose your date range for this so you can see how this month’s posts are performing, or this quarter’s, for example. You can also see the total impressions in the last seven days and whether the trend is going up or down.
Why should you care?
More data and analytics can only be good news for marketers, whether you’re part of a marketing department or running your own company.
According to LinkedIn: “In the past year alone, we’ve seen a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of people following people who have turned on creator mode, and a nearly 30 percent increase in the engagement on content created by people with creator mode turned on.”
It appears that using creator mode not only gains you access to these new analytics, but also gives you increased reach and engagement.
And using your new insights can take that even further:
1) Validate your audience
LinkedIn’s new Demographics insights can help you both learn more about your audience and double-check that your audience is out there on the platform.
Every marketer wants to focus tightly on the platforms where their audience gathers, without wasting any marketing spend on platforms where they don’t. Now you can know for sure whether LinkedIn is a great place to reach your audience or not.
You can also take what you learn from LinkedIn’s new Demographics to solidify your buyer personas. This, of course, can help you give your audience what it wants and better target all of your marketing, not just what you do on LinkedIn.
2) See what’s working and what isn’t
With the new Audience Growth Insights, you’ll be able to keep an eye on whether your audience is growing or not. And insights into your Top Performing Posts can tell you what content your audience really wants and perhaps in what format too.
The combination of the two tools gives you an excellent picture of whether your marketing is working on this platform.
From LinkedIn’s announcement: Audience Growth Insights “can help you determine if a conversation topic, new visual format, or speaking opportunity may have influenced your follower growth, helping you inform your strategy moving forward.”
3) Generate new content ideas
The Top Performing Posts insights show all of your posts ranked in performance order. Study this data and you’ll be able to come up with new content ideas based on what your audience really wants.
See whether videos are more popular than articles. Find your most popular topics. Take a good hard look at what’s really performing well and getting engagement and then do more of that.
4) Download analytics for your reports
All of your analytics data is downloadable to Excel. Simply download what you need and you can edit it and incorporate it into your reports. This allows you to show senior management and the board that your strategies and content are working.
There’s really no bad news here. LinkedIn has given marketers and creators a great opportunity to dig deep into their audiences and their performance on the platform. Take advantage of it.
And there’s more good news for creators as, according to LinkedIn themselves, they’ll be back to share more “new ways to get insights into your content.” You can follow LinkedIn for Creators to stay up-to-date and, of course, we’ll bring you all the latest marketing news as we have it.
