What does 'good' look like on Linkedin?

For about 6 weeks now, I have been toying around with the Linkedin analytics software Inlytics.io. I also had a look at Shield initially, but decided the subscription was too expensive weighed against how much I would personally gain from using it for analysing my own activities. Inlytics ended up having a great Lifetime Deal on Appsumo, so I jumped on it. Anyway - they are comparable analytics tools for looking at the performance of your personal profile.

I haven't really dived into a deep analysis of the numbers yet, but one thing that has struck me is how frustratingly difficult it is to reach anything better than 'bad'. As the saying goes: "One man's floor is another man's ceiling" - and I really feel like Inlytics is either pre-set to match the performance of professional influencers with a very large following of very engaged fans - or I am just shite at using Linkedin!? Either way, of course, is a real bummer and very demotivating.

Let me try and explain what I mean.

The Inlytics dashboard is colour coded. And every post you make is somehow rated to let you know if you got a 'good' number of impressions, likes, comments and ultimately engagement rate. Over time, it looks something like this:

As you can see, over the last months, I haven't struck gold very many times, even though my activity level and 'hit rate' has been fairly normal for this time of year.

What constitutes 'good' on Linkedin?

So far, in the past 3 months, my best Engagement Rate has been 2.83% - a post I made about an interview with Commetric's Head of Analysis about their Top 100 PR Influencer Index.

As you can see, even 2.83% Engagement Rate is barely enough to move me from Red to Dark Orange. And most of my posts typically have an engagement rate of 1.5-2.5%.

The only time I managed to get 'a green indicator' in my entire dashboard was when I posted a Linkedin blogpost about West Midland Trains and their messed up security exercise - a PR debacle.

This time, I scored an Engagement Score of a stunning 28.57% - but only because the total number of views of the post was 7 people, 2 of which left a comment (but no likes). Any more views of that post will obviously ruin my green statistic immediately...

My highest number of Impressions on a personal post during these months was 5,178 - on a post in which I poured my heart out and talked about anxiety coming back to public speaking after Covid lockdown.

As you can see, even with 5,178 Impressions, I am still in Dark Orange, but 94 Likes and 21 Comments are evaluated as Dark Orange and Middle Orange respectively. For a total of 2.22% Engagement Score, that is a Red - my overall most succesful personal post of the entire period.

I did another post which was a simple recommendation of my fantastic business coach, Anette Riis, which apparently struck a cord with a lot of people - maybe because it was a feel-good moment?

3,831 Impressions, 81 Likes and 2 Comments for a total Engagement Score of 2.17% - and still Dark Orange or Red, despite being in my Top 3 of best performing personal posts in the period. I also know for a fact that some readers contacted Anette because of this post and she got some business out of it, which makes me very happy.

How far out of reach is 'Yellow'?

Of course, I started asking myself what it would take to actually get to the yellow colour-code and I did manage it a few times.

A follow-up post to the article on Commetric's PR Influencer Index got 24 Comments - a fair bit of discussion and something that happens to me on my posts only very rarely. It helped this time around that I tagged a number of people in the comments, which spurred the conversation along.

The ONLY time I got actual yellow was a complete fluke: Professor Peggy Br?nn in Oslo had shared a story about Norway requiring by law that retouched images used in Social Media advertising had to be clearly labeled as such.

I shared it as a bit of curious news content on a slow day - and it just 'went viral' (not really, but by my usual standards, it did). The views and likes kept coming in over the course of a full week and when it finally slowed down, the post had 7,629 Impressions, 180 Likes and 18 Comments (but still only an Engagement Rate of 2.50%).

What is extra interesting about this link I shared to a Norwegian media outlet is that I have later seen it pop up in the Danish mainstream media and Op Eds - a chain reaction started by my sharing it with people, who then went on to use it for their own purposes. So you never know what a piece of content shared is going to lead to. This, at least for me, was somewhat remarkable and a lesson that you cannot always plan success.

On the other hand, was this a succes? I was simply re-posting what someone else had shared on Facebook - I did not use it to flex my professional muscles or demonstrate my expertise or 'build my brand'. I seriously doubt that even though a lot of people saw this, it did anything for my brand or my business. So the yellow colour of success is all a matter of perspective.

What does success look like to you on Linkedin?

I am not sharing all of this because I am looking for encouragement or a pat on the back - but I would love to hear from you:

• HOW you set your personal criteria for success on Linkedin? Where do you set the bar and what metrics or levels are you attempting to reach or maintain?
• IF you are using Inlytics, Shield or a diffent kind of software to get you insights into how you are performing? And if so, what you are learning from them? Do you find using them encouraging or discouraging?
• WHAT statistics you may have gleaned from others about Linkedin use that might help all of us develop some kind of useful benchmark for 'good' on this platform? :-)

Cheers, and thanks for reading this all the way through!

Jesper Andersen is the owner and manager of Quantum PR Measurement, a company which specialises in helping companies, organisations and public authorities link and align their business goals with their communication objectives in a way that allows them to measure business value created.