LinkedIn Adds Analytics Tool For Posts

Most dealerships use LinkedIn primarily for recruiting purposes and to connect to others in the auto industry to increase the visibility of their business. In an effort to expand the ways people use its platform, LinkedIn has added a new analytics tool to allow users to gain insights into the traffic that their posts receive.

LinkedIn has recently reported significant growth in the quantity of original content that is posted on the platform. Earlier this year, its self-publishing tool was opened up to all 230 million users who live in English-speaking countries. According to a LinkedIn representative, this tool is seeing 100,000 published posts per week, with more than 1.5 million posts on the platform overall. Now, with its new analytics tool, users can view insights about posts going back six months, including how many users viewed, liked and shared each post, as well as which LinkedIn users took each of these actions. The tool also offers demographic breakdowns based on areas such as industry, location and job title. It’s important to note that these insights are only available about logged-in users. Data is not available about those who view posts via a Web link without being logged into a LinkedIn account.

Another valuable aspect of LinkedIn’s new analytics tool is the ability to view traffic and other statistics based on days of the week, which allows dealerships to better understand how their audience engages with their posts on a daily basis.

In the past, the only way to get a sense of how well posts resonated with users was by reading comments. With the new analytics tool, dealerships will be able to gain a much more advanced understanding about which posts are interesting to others and which posts are not, as well as details about who these users are. In a sense, the new tool can be seen as similar to LinkedIn’s current “Who’s viewed your profile” service, but instead to provide information about “Who’s viewed your posts.”

Dealerships may find that this new analytics tool increases the value of using LinkedIn as a platform to drive traffic to their website, for lead generation and of course recruiting. LinkedIn member David Petherick put together the following list of some of the ways that these analytics can be used:

1. I can see the audience I am reaching by industry. location and even job title, and see if it aligns with who I am trying to reach.

2. I can see where traffic is being driven from and see where I can try to stimulate more traffic.

3. I can see patterns of visit behavior, and act to share further when traffic starts to tail off.

4. I can engage with and thank the people who have read, liked, commented on or shared my work easily.

Petherick’s ideas could certainly be applied by a dealership, and could be used to increase the value of LinkedIn for any business. Perhaps the addition of this analytics tool is simply the beginning of a continuing evolution by LinkedIn to become a more relevant platform for lead generation and for increasing Web traffic.

The company is rolling out the feature slowly, so not everyone has access yet, but all users should see the analytics tool in their accounts soon.