A couple of days ago I was training a company in Linkedin Marketing - I was amazed how many of them were on the platform but not really using it.
The training went well - they understood and went away with a host of tools to use and tips to maximise their time.
I then read this by Bernard Marr - ironically on Linkedin - on Linkedin - so I thought I would pop it here for next time.
As you see, the beauty of all these social media platforms is that you can measure most things very accurately. And therefore give an ROI to training very quickly.
Measuring your success on LinkedIn will help you make sure you get what you want and allows you to track your ROI on your investment in time etc.
There are some easy ‘input’ metrics you can track using your LinkedIn page. You can track things like:
‘Your Network Size’ or ‘Total Connections’ - You can quickly see your number of connections and network size on your home page by clicking the ‘connections’ tab. Growing your network will help you grow your influence and visibility in LinkedIn.
Level of new invitations – counting the amount of new invitations is a good way of tracking that your network is continuing to grow. If you get a good level of new invitation every week then you know that you are growing your influence and potential value from your LinkedIn activities. Again, you can use the LinkedIn system to give you this information by clicking on the ‘Your LinkedIn Statistics’ tab and clicking on the ‘new people’ hyperlink.
LinkedIn Profile Views – another statistic LinkedIn will provide you is the number of people who have accessed your LinkedIn profile in the last week. Keeping an eye on these stats will give you a good idea of your growing LinkedIn presence. If you have up-graded to the premium account you will not only get the number of views but even their names, job titles, and industry – which makes it even more powerful. Even though the above ‘input’ measures will give you some initial insights, their values are limited. Slightly more sophisticated are ‘engagement’ metrics that look at interactions and level of engagement. I suggest you look at measures such as:
Level of Interactions (e.g. likes and comments) on updates – a great way to build a presence of LinkedIn is to write regular up-dates and a test of whether these up-dates are relevant and useful to your community and network is to look at the number of likes you get and the number of comments your posts generate. A nice way to boost your interactions is to join relevant groups on LinkedIn and post questions and comments on discussion threads. Potential employers and business customer will look for influential people in their industry and the level of interactions is a good measure of such influence.
Endorsed skills – on LinkedIn you can list the skills you believe you have. What is powerful is that members of your network can now endorse or ‘confirm’ those skills. This is a powerful way of getting endorsements for your claims and recruiters are paying increasing attention to these endorsed skills. It is therefore a good idea to encourage and remind people in your network to endorse your skills.
Total number of recommendations – an even more powerful way of assessing your influence and level of endorsements from others is the number of recommendations you have.
Other LinkedIn members have the ability to write a recommendation about you. You can also use a function within LinkedIn to asked individuals in your network to recommend you. It is therefore a great idea to get into the routine of asking exiting and past employers, colleagues or customers to write recommendations. Only for the fact that potential future employers or customers will surely take note of any recommendations.
Which is great news as on my Linkedin Page I have lots of recommendations and more endorsements than many of the people I respect in the industry (which makes me wonder a little about the validity of them as a true measure of influence.)
Measures of engagement are more insightful than the simple input measures but even engagement measures should not be confused with ‘outcome’ measures. Outcome measures track the ultimate success of your LinkedIn activities and provide you with the definitive insights of your LinkedIn success. While it is great to grow your network and even better to engage with your contacts, the final goal is to either generate new and better job offers or to generate new business. Unless this is happening, your LinkedIn activities are still questionable. So here are your ultimate LinkedIn success indicators:
Total number of business leads – If you are on LinkedIn to generate new business then measuring the number (and quality) of leads generated is essential. Simply keep track on how may requests for business you have had and make sure you validate the requests by establishing the value of these request in terms of potential revenue or quality of leads. You don’t want to generate a great number of sub-quality leads or requests for ‘free’ advices. The number of real business leads is a great start but the number of quality and validated business leads is even better.
Number of job offers – if you are on LinkedIn to improve your career and attract new job offers than this is what you should be tracking: How many job offers have you received. However, similarly to the business leads, it is useful to qualify the job offers you are receiving – are they the stepping stone offers you are hoping for or are they sub-quality job offers for you to move sideways?
The above set of ‘input, engagement and outcome’ metrics are a great starting point to better understand the return on investment you are getting from your LinkedIn activities. However, there are other social media indicators such as online share of voice, social networking footprint, or influence measures such as the Klout Score or Peer Index.
Having talked about LinkedIn success measures – I would love for you to engage with me and follow me, maybe endorse my skills, or recommend me, or at least comment on this piece – what are your thoughts? Are there other indicators you use? Please let me know and grow your own influence by commenting and engaging…
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