An analytical quickie!

This article is being written super spontaneously. I actually wanted to write about something completely different, but the opportunity simply arose while I checked the numbers of the announcement post for my company page I made via my private profile (you can check and like it here).

People always think doing analytics is hard. It's not. You fetch numbers, you check numbers, you interpret numbers. And sometimes the "fetch"-part is easier than you think, for example when the platform you posted on simply throws the numbers at you, so let's dig in.

Below you can see the numbers I got:

Obviously 2,133 views are not "Influencer"-level, but still it's a good point to start from (BTW: Influencers are struggling anyway, turns out having a real job finally pays off).

For example, the four most common titles of people who have seen my post are:

• Salesperson
• Software Developer
• Recruiter
• Founder

Why does it matter? I don't want to target Salespeople. Or Software Developers (still love you guys for reading this!). Founders and Recruiters however are perfectly fine, these ARE the people I want to target. So what now? We'll come to this in a second.

What else do I see? Munich generated more views than the next ten places on the list combined (take that, Berlin!!). But also I see that even though I posted in English, at least one third of people who saw my post are located in German speaking regions ("at least" because I don't get more granular numbers, so it's probably even more). Same question again: why does it matter?

Judging from the insights above I should do two things:

1. use hashtags that are more catered towards founders and recruiters
2. write in German because most of my audience is in Germany.

Or should I? That's the hard part of analytics, defining what you should do with the numbers you generated. Obviously there are more salespeople and developers than founders (not just on LinkedIn but in the world), so maybe this isn't actually that bad.

Also, the two biggest locations on my list, Munich and Berlin, are international startup hotspots, so probably most people from these locations still prefer English.

So what's the answer? What do I need to change? The answer is:

"Don't fix problems you don't have"

Since I posted this update I received lots of messages from friends and colleagues telling me how they like the logo (and the rest of the page, but mostly the logo) as well as some inquiries about future cooperations and some concrete questions about HR & recruiting. Could it be more? Definitely. Could I handle more? Probably not. Did I achieve what I wanted? Absolutely.

This is the first lesson. Always check your numbers, always think about what they mean, but don't change if you are getting the results you want.

That being said, I will still experiment with other languages (maybe a bavarian post??) and other hashtags to see how I can tweak my reach. Also, I will keep monitoring my numbers and start changing things once I see numbers declining. But that's another story for another article ;)