My Half-Year Review

I’ve been making Posts on LinkedIn for about 7 Months now (Oct. 2022 – Apr. 2023), so I decided now would be a good time to review the results I’ve had. To show the results, I also have screenshots?to go with each information group of 7 Months (with the 365 day history), 3 Months and 1 Month.

Before I begin, let me note that all of these graphs can be found on LinkedIn for you to see with your own account. To find them, you need to turn on "Creator Mode" (found on your profile page), then by going to the "Home" page, there will be a bit of text "Analytics & tools" now below your name and profile photo at the top left side of the page.

7 Months of Impressions

To start off, as stated above I began making post on LinkedIn 7 Months ago, for every Monday since starting October last year. However, in January 2023 I also began publishing a LinkedIn newsletter Once a month on Wednesday. So to clarify which posts are which, I made Red dots over regular posts, and Green dots over each Newsletter issue.

I’ll quick clarify how the graph above works, the information being tracked is “Number of Impressions Per Day”, so while there is a spike on each day a post is made live, the spike does not indicate the “Lifetime” amount of impressions a post received.

For an example, you may be able to see a small spike near Apr 27 at the beginning of the graph above. That spike is from an article I wrote months before I started making regular posts, and since making and releasing that article, I had not created any more content on LinkedIn until October 2022. So each of those little bumps from April to October, are impressions that my article continued to generate long after it was originally published.

To quick summarize my interpretation of this data: I am happy to see that aside from a few outliers, my impressions are steady. Yes, my later posts are lower than three particularly good groupings at the front (Right above Oct 24, Dec 23, and that tall spike in between), but my technical goal of creating posts is to “cultivate” a regular and predictable audience, than a popular but sporadic audience. (It all depends on what you want to do, but right now making predictable results is my goal).

That should be most of the “Unique” information for this graph, the other graphs will have their own points I will cover, but they should be shorter than this first section.

Top Posts in Past 7 Months

Here’s snippets of my Top posts since I started making posts. The subjects for these posts are: Making and talking about connections in Post 1, Talking about the connections I have and what they are in Post 2, and Talking about Help and how we may be unwilling to accept it.

Something interesting to note, is when comparing the numbers here to the graph above. While my top post has over 1000 impressions, the highest peak in the impressions graph is a bit over 300 impressions. The main reason for how this happened, is that the impressions graph tracks by how many impressions you received in a day. So since the most impressions I’ve ever received in a day is around 300, that means these top posts were either actively got their impressions over the first few days or week, or the posts could have gained more impressions long after the initial posting.

(Side note, 1st and 3rd posts are from 5 months ago, and 2nd post is from 6 months ago)

3 Months of Impressions

Here’s the impressions graph for the last three months. The graph looks more stable now, but I’m down “28.9 Percent in the past 90 days”. What that number refers to is comparing the 90 days in this graph, to the previous 90 days that occurred before this graph.

?Sadly I can’t just pick any part of my timeline and ask LinkedIn to make a graph (that I know of), but comparing this graph to the 7 Month impression graph, the period before this graph had a few periods that were much Higher than the current graph (October & December 2022) , but also a few periods that were much lower (not marked, but would be the months of November and January.

Ideally I’m trying to reach a stable audience that’s easier to track and grow, than trying to figure out how to replicate the results of that one good post.

Top Posts in Past 3 Months

Quick note here: While the top two posts are my regular Monday posts, the third post is for my Newsletter. (When you release a newsletter issue, you also make a little post to go with it and link back to the newsletter article)

Otherwise the topics for these posts are: First post talking about making 500 Connections in a single year, Second post is able what makes a good vacation or extended break, and the Third post is about what monetization is and how people use it.

(Posts were released 1 month ago for top post, and 2 months ago for second and third posts)

1 Month of Impressions

Here’s the last impressions graph, covering from the end of March to the end of April. Since it’s easiest to the peaks and valleys of this graph, I wanted to explain a bit more about the valleys. While the peaks represent the day I release a post, the valleys show how long after a post is released that impressions are still being made.

For example, from April 3rd to April 11th you can see the line drop to near zero on the graph, meaning that April 3rd’s post completely (or nearly) stopped making new impressions, thus ending its life cycle of being shared. But looking at April 11th to April 15th, we can see that the valley holds a near flatline, up until the next post is released. This is ideal, because if someone is looking at your old post, there’s a chance that your new/current post may also be recommended to them too.

The third valley from April 19th to April 23rd is a bit unique, because the valley rises before the next post releases. However, the reason for this lies with the Two spikes above April 19th, with the left spike being a Monday post and the right spike being a Wednesday Newsletter post. In my experience, newsletters tend to gain more traction a few days after the issue. So the rise in the valley before the next spike is from the newsletter (at least that’s what I assume based on current information)

Top Posts in 1 Month

In this last month, there is technically only 5 posts being picked from, so the “Top 3” isn’t really that prestigious or performative in this case.

But I will point out a couple things, such as the 3rd post having more Likes than the 2nd post, but making less impressions. And that the order of popular posts is actually the reverse of order the posts we’re made (the newest posts are most popular).

The 1st post talked about scheduling posts compared to manually releasing posts, the 2nd and 3rd posts were a Two-Part post relating to how our friends and family can be useful in our professional lives.

My Top 10 Posts (in 7 Months)

Since there is also a Top 10 list for best performing posts, I thought I’d also share it here. The list is split into 2 screenshots of 5 posts (Upper 5 and Lower 5). And to save space, I will have links to the top 10 posts in a pinned in a comment if you wish to see the full posts.

Engagements of Past Year

There is also a graph for engagements received on your posts and other content, but since there is less data here and impressions are easier to track, I decided to just use this yearly graph at the end.

To clarify, Engagements are both Reactions (likes or other emotes) and Comments. These usually result from having a good number of impressions, which leads them to being rarer. But Engagements help drive your posts to be shared with more people, which in turn creates more impressions.

They’re good to have, but since I’ve been focusing on impressions, I haven’t experimented too much with driving up engagements. Giving topics that are agreeable or make people want to give their opinion on can be a good start, however.

Quick final note, do you see those two dips that go Below the line? Technically that could be from someone liking your post or making a comment, but then undoing the like or deleting the comment on a different day. This is unlikely since revisiting posts is abnormal for most people. But there is another explanation! LinkedIn does allow you to delete your LinkedIn account, and when your account is deleted, all engagements that account has made are also deleted. (I found this out by going through my LinkedIn messaging list of conversations, and found a couple convos addressed to “deleted account”, and if they are who I think they were, had previously interacted with my posts.)

Followers of Past Year

One point to bring up right away, when you make a new connection on LinkedIn, you automatically “follow” them, and they will automatically “follow” you. This is different from LinkedIn’s Creator Mode which prioritizes creating followers instead of connections. So while I was “generating followers” according to this graph, this is a side effect of me making connections. If you’re trying to gain followers using Creator Mode, the graph would not look like this one (more gradual than spikey).

So what’s happening here, is that whenever I accept a connection request, or someone accepts my connection request, a follower is made. So one thing to note with the spikes, is that I don’t check LinkedIn over the weekend. So while I may have connection requests sitting, they don’t register as followers until I confirm them. Meaning that most of these spikes are Mondays, and the valleys (drops that are zero) are probably Saturdays and Sundays.

In Summary

I’m not going to claim to be a “LinkedIn Professional”, especially since I’m still in my first year of making posts, tracking impressions, and attempting to write engaging topics. What I can say is that I’ve made progress, and while the 7-month graphs make it seem like I’ve already hit my peak, I can now see that I’m creating more stable results now compared to the spikes and drops in my first few months.

Truth be told I had been feeling like I was losing progress over the last few months, but this article gave me a better idea of how I am actually performing, and I’m not trending downward as I originally thought.

Though it would be ideal if my audience was bigger, and I should always be striving to grow my audience as long as I’m on LinkedIn. But considering that I originally had an audience of Zero, I can be thankful for the progress I’ve made to this point.?