Proving its commitment to becoming a serious content platform, LinkedIn has this week launched a new analytics feature that provides insight into the reach of published posts.
Post insights go back six months, allowing users to see not just who has viewed their content, but what industry they work in, what their job title is, where they’re located and how they discovered the post.
For LinkedIn content marketers, this is great news — particularly when it comes to making decisions about future content.
Audience targeting
By comparing who’s reading your content to who you’d like to be reading your content, it’s possible to get a good idea of whether you’re pitching your articles too high, too low, or at the wrong audience entirely.
For example, a brand using LinkedIn primarily for recruitment might benefit from publishing content that highlights the positive aspects of the company culture (e.g. a case study on how the company has used video games to increase productivity at work) — but if the goal is to build a relationship with industry influencers, this content might not be quite so effective.
Audience insights make it much easier to tell whether your content is appealing to the right people. In turn, this helps brands to target future content more effectively.
SEO optimisation
Just like Google Analytics, LinkedIn’s new analytics tool allows you to see where your traffic is coming from, and what search terms people have entered in order to reach your post.
If these search queries don’t accurately reflect the content of your post (and by extension, the audience you’d like to attract) then you may need to rethink the types of keywords you are using in both post title and content.
Connecting with influencers
As the new insights feature allows you to see who is sharing, commenting and liking your content the most, it provides a good opportunity to reach out and open a dialogue with them. You can message the people who interact with your posts directly from the analytics dashboard.
Interact with other people’s content
The networking benefits of this work both ways, and are likely to incentivise interaction for some users. Regularly engaging with another brand’s posts is going to draw attention to your personal profile, as they’ll keep noticing you on their analytics dashboard.
Really, this is what LinkedIn is all about: making business connections. The publishing platform, and the new analytics feature, just make it easier to do that.