Bernard Marr best-selling business author and enterprise performance expert has cultivated several key metrics for measuring success on LinkedIn. In today's post I am pleased to share content from Bernard's research along with my own thoughts. |
So you are on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network with nearly 200 million members. However is LinkedIn worth your time? Are you using it in a way that generates real benefits for your professional and personal goals? If not you should. Why? More than 80% of LinkedIn users are decision makers at their companies. Plus over half of Fortune 100 companies hire through LinkedIn. |
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What Are You Goals?
Now that you know that LinkedIn and networking is powerful, but are you reaching your goals?
First what are your goals? -- In my seminar LinkedIn Simplified I lead intense discussions around goal setting which is the most overlooked element of having success with LinkedIn. If you have not set goals for this year it is not too late. In my post: Making Your Dreams Larger Than Your Memories I discuss the importance of incorporating goals into our lives.
Second, regardless of what your goals are LinkedIn is just a tool to achieve them. Because to achieve any goal you need people and influence. LinkedIn will help you connect to people and will assist in growing your influence with then. |
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Measuring Your LinkedIn Influence
With goals in hand you can now take full advantage of the metric gathering capability that LinkedIn has to offer. Allowing you to quickly and easily track your return on investment (ROI) and influence within your network against the goals you have set. |
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LinkedIn Influence Index
Bernard Marr best-selling business author and enterprise performance expert has developed 8 key metrics that make up what I call the "LinkedIn Influence Index. All which can be tracked easily and quickly from your LinkedIn page.
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1. The Size of Your Network
You can quickly see your number of connections and network size on your home page by clicking the 'connections' tab. Growing your network will help you grow your influence and visibility in LinkedIn. |
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2. Numer of New Invatations
Counting the amount of new invitations is a good way of tracking that your network is continuing to grow. If you get a good level of new invitation every week then you know that you are growing your influence and potential value from your LinkedIn activities. Again, you can use the LinkedIn system to give you this information by clicking on the 'Your LinkedIn Statistics' tab and clicking on the 'new people' hyperlink. |
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3. LinkedIn Profile Views
Another statistic LinkedIn will provide you is the number of people who have accessed your LinkedIn profile in the last week. Keeping an eye on these stats will give you a good idea of your growing LinkedIn presence. If you have up-graded to the premium account you will not only get the number of views but even their names, job titles, and industry - which makes it even more powerful. |
Even though the above 'input' measures will give you some initial insights, their values are limited. Slightly more sophisticated are 'engagement' metrics that look at interactions and level of engagement. I suggest you look at measures such as: |
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4. Number of Likes & Comments
A great way to build a presence of LinkedIn is to write regular up-dates and a test of whether these up-dates are relevant and useful to your community and network is to look at the number of likes you get and the number of comments your posts generate. A nice way to boost your interactions is to join relevant groups on LinkedIn and post questions and comments on discussion threads. Potential employers and business customer will look for influential people in their industry and the level of interactions is a good measure of such influence.
Grow your influence by sharing this and other How to be a LinkedIn Ninja posts
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5. Skills Endorcements
On LinkedIn you can list the skills you believe you have. What is powerful is that members of your network can now endorse or 'confirm' those skills. This is a great way of getting endorsements for your claims and recruiters are paying increasing attention to these endorsed skills. It is therefore a good idea to encourage and remind people in your network to endorse your skills. |
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6. Total Number of Recommendations
An even more powerful way of assessing your influence and level of endorsements from others is the number of recommendations you have. Other LinkedIn members have the ability to write a recommendation about you. You can also use a function within LinkedIn to asked individuals in your network to recommend you. It is therefore a great idea to get into the routine of asking exiting and past employers, colleagues or customers to write recommendations. Only for the fact that potential future employers or customers will surely take note of any recommendations. |
2 ultimate measures of your LinkedIn success |
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7. Total Number of Business Leads
If you are on LinkedIn to generate new business then measuring the number (and quality) of leads generated is essential. Simply keep track on how may requests for business you have had and make sure you validate the requests by establishing the value of these request in terms of potential revenue or quality of leads. You don't want to generate a great number of sub-quality leads or requests for 'free' advices. The number of real business leads is a great start but the number of quality and validated business leads is even better. |
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8. Number of Job Offers
If you are on LinkedIn to improve your career and attract new job offers than this is what you should be tracking: How many job offers have you received. However, similarly to the business leads, it is useful to qualify the job offers you are receiving - are they the stepping stone offers you are hoping for or are they sub-quality job offers for you to move sideways? |
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The Bottom Line: Let's Engage
Having talked about LinkedIn success measures - I would love for you to engage with me and follow me, maybe endorse my skills, or recommend me, or at least comment on this piece - what are your thoughts? Are there other indicators you use? Please let me know and grow your own influence by commenting and engaging... |
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Marben Bland
 Marben Bland is The LinkedIn Ninja; he trains corporations, job seekers and sales professionals on cutting edge ways to use LinkedIn more effectively. He writes the weekly How to be a LinkedIn Ninja blog and is a popular speaker at trade shows and seminars. Call Marben today at 608.358.1309 to have him train your company or speak at your next event.
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