Social media audits are an essential part of growth hacking.
They allow you to evaluate your campaigns over an extended period, be more efficient with your marketing budget, and allow you to look at trends to capitalize on.
In today’s quick guide, we take a look at LinkedIn audits in particular and what you can do with them.
We break down the factors to look at and the frequency of your audits.
We’ll focus on auditing organic marketing campaigns but we’ll even throw in some tips so that you can take a look at your paid campaigns, too.
Let’s start the LinkedIn audit!
Here’s how you can perform a Facebook audit like a growth hacker!
I Track Everything, What’s the Point of a LinkedIn Audit?
You might be asking.
“What’s the point of a LinkedIn audit, if you’ve always been telling me to track individual campaigns?”
Tracking individual campaigns is great, but it doesn’t give you the big picture.
That’s the purpose of an audit.
It helps you look at how all of your campaigns have contributed to the overall digital marketing direction you’re taking.
Regular audits will tell you which platforms have been performing well, which channels to concentrate on, and how you’ve been spending both time and money in getting the results that you have now.
It gives you time to take a step back and reassess the decisions you’ve been making for your marketing efforts.
Tools You’ll Need
You don’t need anything fancy for an audit.
Just a spreadsheet to log in results, screen clipping software to copy graphics onto your sheet, and your LinkedIn account.
If you’re running ads, you need to have super admin privileges to LinkedIn’s ad manager.
The same goes for auditing your company page posts.
How Often Should I Be Conducting LinkedIn Audits?
You can’t conduct LinkedIn audits every week, it takes up too much time and you might get caught up in what we like to call “analysis paralysis” and that’s just terrible.
We advise doing LinkedIn audits at the end of every month.
You can add it to your other audits such as your Facebook ads audit so you can start each month with fresh campaigns.
Another option would be every two months but remember you won’t be able to analyze trends quickly with that approach.
At the very least you should be doing it every three months/quarter. Then, a general audit by the end of the year for good measure and to end the year right!
Auditing Your Organic LinkedIn Posts
The most important audit that you should be doing on a monthly basis is on your organic posts on LinkedIn.
These posts determine your organic reach and how your audience is reacting to your voice on the platform.
A LinkedIn audit of posts also tells you if people are actively engaged with you.
Now there are a number of factors that you have to take a look at when you audit your posts.
First Steps
Prep a spreadsheet so that you can list down the following items below and make notes on the content.
Number of Reactions
Take note of the number of reactions that you’re getting for each of your posts.
Remember, LinkedIn supports six types of reactions: “Like”, “Celebrate”, “Support”, “Love”, “Insightful”, and “Curious”.
If you want to do a more granular audit, count your “Like”s and everything else separately. A “Like” on LinkedIn is easy to give since it involves one click/tap, but the other reactions require the engager to spend more time on the post.
We often give a higher value to posts that have a higher count of everything else apart from “Like”.
Number of Comments
What’s a better barometer than reactions?
The number of comments.
Comments are one of the driving forces of LinkedIn virality because it means that people were so engaged with the post, that they wanted to take the time to react to it. Naturally, if people are spending time reacting to a post LinkedIn wants it in front of more people so that they can keep them on the site.
There are different levels of comments.
Just because one post got a lot of comments doesn’t mean that it’s the best that you have out there.
Check out the comment length and substance.
This should give you clues on what types of content you’re producing that people like.
Number of Shares
A lot of social media platforms have been taking shareability as a massive indicator if they’re going to show your post to more people.
One good example is Facebook which reportedly tweaked its algorithm to make sure that posts that are shared in the second degree – shared after they were shared – are rewarded.
Shareability is a great metric to look at because it means your post was engaging enough that people made a conscious decision to include it in their own feeds.
However, not all posts that perform well have a high number of shares, there will be some posts that people will resonate with but only get reactions instead.
Number of Views
The number of views you’re getting for a post is a massive indicator of how much your post resonated with your prospects that LinkedIn just had to put in front of more eyeballs for it to be appreciated.
It’s one of the first things we take a look at when we do our LinkedIn audits because it also shows us how much exposure LinkedIn is giving us.
Needless to say, if you want to do better on your organic campaigns, pay attention to the posts with the highest number of views.
There is a correlation between the number of engagement (reactions and comments) and the number of views that you’re getting for a post, but you also want to match this number with the “ratio” of reactions you’re getting.
Auditing Your LinkedIn Articles
When auditing your LinkedIn articles, you want to take at the same stats as you would your LinkedIn posts. However, do note that LinkedIn articles and newsletters, usually get fewer engagements than posts that people are more used to seeing.
The reasoning behind this is simple, articles or newsletters seem to be more labor-intensive to consume so it would make sense that people are more reluctant to take a look at them.
Nevertheless, you still need to pay attention to the stats that you have to make an informed decision on your LinkedIn audit.
There are some topics that are worth covering with LinkedIn articles and newsletters, but since they take more time to produce, you need to make sure that you’re covering the right topics only.
What Are We Comparing?
Now that we’ve taken a look at all the metrics that we need, it’s time to figure out how you can start comparing posts and articles, that you’re publishing on LinkedIn.
You want to take your top 10 performing posts and look at the reasons why they’re performing well.
Here is the list of things you should compare them.
Media
Whether it be inspirational infographics, repurposed videos, or even attachments, you’ll find an underlying pattern of what works with your audience.
It could be the design elements or the subject of your design, the way a video is cropped, color schemes, etc.
Always keep in mind that if something went viral for one user, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for you. No two audiences are the same for two different users, so you need to find media that resonates well with the audience that you’ve built.
Lengths
Content lengths matter.
And, you’ll soon realize this when you start your audit.
Typically, LinkedIn posts will be shorter than LinkedIn articles, but how short or how long is also primarily dependent on the audience that you command on the platform.
For example, younger audiences have shorter attention spans, and it will take a better “hooking” approach for you to get them to the entire piece of content you’ve created.
Check out the content lengths of the content you’re releasing and try to find a pattern.
Post Types
Video often works the best because it’s engaging.
But, you know what?
Some of our top-performing posts were text posts because we specialized in story-telling using plain-text founder stories.
Images can also perform well if they bring about emotion.
Sometimes we’ll even convert a plain-text founder story into an infographic-like image so that users can interact with it, save it, and make it appear that the text post length is shorter.
At the beginning of these audits, you want to take advantage of the media types that bring you the most traction.
However, always experiment to make sure you’re changing it up.
Your audience will appreciate it.
Plus, as your audience grows, you’ll find that each media type will cater to the different segments of that audience.
Cover Images
If you share posts from your website or blog a lot, you’ll find that the cover/featured image will be shared as well.
Now, this is a critical thing to note if you’re doing an audit because people do judge their articles and links by their cover.
Try to check if there’s a correlation between the featured images you’re using and the engagement a shared post is getting. If you find that it’s influenced by design, then you have to start updating your designs before you upload your articles on LinkedIn.
This also applies to your LinkedIn articles!
Here’s a quick tip: if you find that a certain style works for the featured images of your LinkedIn articles, try to create a template of that design to use in the future.
Text Structure
The text structure is how you visually present written text.
As you’ll notice from the posts that I, our clients, and BAMF puts out, we follow a very strict three lines per paragraph policy.
The effect is that it makes posts less intimidating to read.
And, that matters.
People don’t like things that are text-heavy, especially if they are just casually browsing through LinkedIn on a lunch break.
Your audience needs something that is easy to digest because it gets them to read it.
It’s useless to create really great posts if people are reluctant to read them.
The other reason is that it makes your posts mobile-friendly. A lot of people on LinkedIn will be on their phones when they check out your content, and it’s easy for things to look text-heavy when a smaller device is being used.
I’m also a firm believer in designing symmetry into your lines.
You can start your first line a little longer like this.
And, then slowly, and gradually shorten it.
Until it becomes an inverted pyramid.
Or you could do the opposite.
Start shorter.
And, then start adding more.
Until each line that follows gets longer.
The human eye is naturally attracted to patterns, and that’s why even poets employ the same mechanism.
And it works.
Subject-Matter
Your subject matter has to resonate with your audience.
Take stock of what you’ve been talking about in your content.
Is it work-related, value, advice, personal thoughts, etc.?
Then try to make sure that you post more of these types of subject-matter, while at the same time continuing with your experimentation with other campaign types.
Auditing Changes in Your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn profile audits are a little more difficult to measure especially if you’re running more subtle changes.
However, you can get a good sense of how people are reacting to your profile by simply looking at how many profile views you’ve been getting.
Do note that this is also tied to how your posts are performing.
Also, check on how many inbound leads you’re getting that can be attributed to LinkedIn. Remember even if your prospects like what you’re posting, they still need to be convinced about working with you through your profile.
Takeaways
Regular LinkedIn audits are an essential part of growth.
They tell you about how you’re doing and what other changes you can make.
More importantly, they allow you to take a step back and review your entire campaign as a whole.
And if you can’t see your campaign and its big picture, you won’t know where you’re headed.
