LinkedIn Creator: How to Improve Your Content * Anna Bruno

Are you using LinkedIn’s creator mode? Are your content pieces reaching the right prospects? In this article, you’ll discover how to use LinkedIn Creator Mode Analytics to evaluate your posts and improve your reach.

Summary

#1: How to Access LinkedIn Creator Analytics

As of December 2022, LinkedIn’s updated Creator Analytics is available to all personal profiles. To access these analytics, you first need to enable Creator mode on your personal profile. To activate Creator mode, go to your LinkedIn profile and locate the Resources panel. Make sure the Creator Mode section shows a green Active label. If not, open the Creator hub and switch on Creator mode.

After you enable Creator mode, you’ll have access to the analytics data that LinkedIn rolled out at the start of 2022, as well as the updated analytics introduced by the platform in December 2022. You can access these analytics on both desktop and mobile from two key locations:

The Analytics panel near the top of your LinkedIn profile
The Analytics panel at the bottom of each LinkedIn post

#2: Using LinkedIn Creator Mode Analytics to Understand Your LinkedIn Audience

LinkedIn Creator Mode automatically enables a Follow option for your profile. Since it allows LinkedIn members to follow you instead of requesting a connection, creator mode can help you increase the visibility of your profile and your content marketing.

On one hand, it’s ideal for expanding your influence and reaching more of your target audience. But rapidly growing your audience means you might lose track of who’s following you and whether you’re posting the right kind of content. With the new Audience Analytics panel, you can more easily understand who your followers are and spot trends.

You can access this information by tapping or clicking the Analytics panel at the top of your profile and going to the Audience tab. Click or tap the Last 7 days dropdown to change the default time frame.

New followers chart

How fast is your audience growing? Are you meeting growth goals or falling short? By tracking your new followers over time, you can better understand whether you’re successfully building influence and growing an audience. LinkedIn’s Audience Analytics panel shows the total number of followers you have now, along with the percentage you’ve gained or lost for your selected period. Does your audience growth seem to have slowed recently? It’s helpful to view different time periods and compare them to each other.

For example, you might notice that your annual audience growth rate aligns with your goals. But your growth rate in the last month could be significantly lower than your yearly average. The sooner you identify potentially problematic patterns, the faster you can locate the source and address it before a slower growth rate becomes the norm.

You can also use the LinkedIn Audience Analytics chart to find days when your followers count spiked or dropped suddenly. If you review your content analytics alongside your audience analytics, you might be able to identify which posts drew in those new followers and use them as templates for future content.

Find top demographic data

Now you know how many people follow your account and how fast your audience is growing. But how can you tell if those followers match your ideal customer profile?

Below the follower chart, LinkedIn displays a Top Demographics panel that breaks down your audience’s key characteristics. You can use the dropdown menu to switch between demographic options. Here’s what you can find out about your audience:

Job titles such as CEO and founder, which can help you determine if you’re reaching decision-makers, middle management, or entry-level employees.
Seniority, which provides data points that complement job titles and help confirm you’re attracting followers at the right organizational level.
Locations and metropolitan areas, which can confirm if you’re reaching people in your geographic area or in regions served by your organization.
Industries, which can confirm whether you’re connecting with followers in the fields your business typically serves.
Company size, which reveals whether your content is attracting followers who work at small, midsize, or large companies.
Companies, which list your followers’ employers and help you evaluate where you have greater influence with decision-makers.

You can use this demographic data in several ways. First, you can consider it as you create organic content. You can keep it in mind as you refine your messaging and position your organization.

Is your follower base gradually moving away from your buyer persona? You might consider using this demographic data to create more buyer personas for your profile. Then you can create content that speaks to each customer profile in turn.

Whether your followers’ demographics align with your ideal audience or give you new targeting ideas, you can use them in LinkedIn paid campaigns. All of these audience demographics can easily translate into targeting options in Campaign Manager.

In Campaign Manager, go to the Audience section of your campaign setup and find the Audience attributes panel. You can select demographics that match your current audience or choose related options to reach people similar to your existing followers. For more accurate targeting, make sure to deselect the Enable Audience Expansion option.

#3: Using LinkedIn Creator Mode Analytics to Identify Your Best-Performing LinkedIn Posts

With LinkedIn audience analytics, you can see who follows your account. But how can you tell who’s engaging with your content? With LinkedIn’s updated creator post analytics, you can find your top content and see who’s interacting with it.

You can access creator post analytics using the same workflow described above. Click or tap the Analytics panel at the top of your LinkedIn profile and go to the Posts tab.

Review content performance

Want a quick snapshot of your content’s performance? Use the content performance chart to get an overall view of how many people are seeing and engaging with your posts. By default, the chart shows impressions for the last week. You can use the dropdown menus to change the time frame and toggle between impressions and engagements.

Similar to LinkedIn audience analytics for creators, the Content Analytics panel gives you a total count and a comparison to the previous period. At a glance, you can see whether your content plan has improved results over time or if your posts are missing the mark.

Since this panel includes a line chart, it lets you easily spot the highs and lows. Were your post impressions or engagement stats off the charts on certain days? Were these metrics relatively stable over the entire period?

Although you can hover over any date to view daily impressions or engagement totals, this chart doesn’t provide much insight into why your content performed as it did. For more details, scroll down to the Top Performing Posts panel.

Find your best LinkedIn content

Located below the content performance chart, the Top Performing Posts panel automatically lists your top three posts during the time period you selected. Keep in mind that you can use the dropdown menus to adjust the period and the metric that determines your top posts.

To include additional data in this overview, click on the Show more link at the bottom of the list. In this screen, you can see a complete list of all the content you’ve published during the selected period, organized by performance. It’s helpful to compare your top content across two metrics. Do the lists match, or do some of your posts have lots of impressions but minimal engagement? Make sure to focus your analysis on the metric that best aligns with your goals.

Analyze top-performing posts

To dig deeper into this data, click or tap any content from the Top Performing Posts panel. LinkedIn will automatically take you to the original post, where you can see reactions and comments in context. Under the post, click the View analytics link for details. The Post Analytics panel provides a full breakdown of all relevant discovery and engagement metrics. In addition to impressions, it counts the total number of reactions, comments, reposts, and shares.

Curious who viewed a specific post? Scroll down to the Top Demographics of People Reached panel. Similar to the audience analytics we discussed above, this panel displays key demographic data for each individual post. You can use the dropdown menu to review various demographics including job titles, industries, locations, and more. Note that for privacy reasons, specific company data may be limited until the user count passes a minimum threshold.

For further insights, select any engagement metric. Here you’ll see a summary of highlights for each metric. For example, you might see that founders and advertising professionals were the most responsive to your content.

You can use the dropdown to select other available metrics, or return to the post analytics and choose another metric to review. This allows you to view highlights for each engagement and discovery metric.

If your content has generated a lot of engagement, LinkedIn’s filter options will also prove useful. In the Post Analytics panel, select any demographic group to focus on different job titles, industries, or locations. Then use the Details dropdown to select a demographic group or engagement type. Now you can drill down and see what types of users are interacting with your content, and start brainstorming better ways to reach them.

Connect with individual engaged users

The more filters you apply to the Post Analytics panel, the more insights you can gain about your audience. Want to find the decision-makers who reacted to one of your top posts? Apply the relevant filters and scroll down to the People Who Reacted list for the post. You can click to view each user’s LinkedIn profile and take steps to build a relationship. From there, you can follow them, request a connection, or engage with the content they’ve published.

Improve Your Content Strategy

LinkedIn’s Creator Analytics tools offer you a wealth of useful data. But they won’t tell you exactly how to improve your content or reach your audience more reliably. As you review your audience and content analysis, plan to set aside time to analyze the data and develop an actionable plan.

To get started, answer a few questions about your most engaging posts:

Which demographics were you most trying to reach? Which types of posts connect best with these groups?
Which post formats worked best with your target audience? Did they prefer link shares, text posts, videos, documents, or something else?
Which posts generated the most valuable engagement? Did you ask important questions or simply share something interesting or surprising?
Which topics tended to generate the highest engagement and impressions? How do they align with the interests of your target audience?
Did your best-performing posts focus on your original content or thought leadership? Or were they shares from industry figures and colleagues?

Now you can create a framework for developing more engaging content and avoid wasting time posting content that hasn’t worked in the past. But don’t get stuck in a content routine. It’s also helpful to brainstorm ideas for new topics and formats so you can continue to publish content that resonates with your LinkedIn audience.

#4: Export and Analyze LinkedIn Insights

LinkedIn’s Creator Analytics interface has several positives. The charts and graphs are great for visualizing results and identifying patterns. Plus, the Post and Audience panels both automatically display comparative analytics to provide more useful insights.

However, LinkedIn’s native interface also has some negatives. It does not allow you to select custom time ranges, which means you are limited to reviewing preset periods such as only the previous week, month, or quarter. The Analytics interface also does not support custom sorting or filtering, which can make it difficult to dig deeper into the data.

How to Download LinkedIn Creator Analytics

Fortunately, you can now download LinkedIn Creator Analytics by tapping or clicking the Export button in the top right corner of the interface. Both the mobile app and the desktop version support analytics downloads.

Keep in mind that you only need to export creator analytics once for a given time period. When you press the Export button, you automatically download both post and audience analytics for the selected time frame.

Similar to company page analytics, LinkedIn only provides XLS file exports for Creator Analytics. This means exports do not include diagrams, charts, or comparative data shown in the native interface.

How to Use Exported Creator Analytics

XLS files, however, make it easy to analyze data in spreadsheet apps like Google Sheets. For example, you can use these apps to isolate data from certain periods or sort based on the metrics that matter most to you. In addition, you can use spreadsheet apps to create custom charts that highlight key metrics such as impressions, reactions, or comments. With these additional visualizations, you can better understand your data and identify trends. If you use reporting tools that support Google Sheets integrations, you can also upload your LinkedIn Creator Analytics into third-party programs. Then you can include LinkedIn Creator Analytics in your standard weekly or monthly reports and take smarter actions to achieve your goals.

Conclusion

The updated LinkedIn Creator Analytics offers professionals increasingly useful ways to assess performance and gain insights. With this data, you can better understand content performance and audience engagement so you can improve your strategy and make measurable progress toward your marketing goals.

Source Socialmediaexaminer