LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 810 million members worldwide. As a professional platform, LinkedIn provides a wealth of data that can be leveraged to glean valuable insights into your brand, competitors, industry trends, target audience, and more. With the ability to extract key LinkedIn metrics, marketers can make data-driven decisions to optimize their LinkedIn and overall marketing strategies.
What LinkedIn data is available?
There are several types of data points that can be pulled from LinkedIn to provide useful metrics and KPIs:
- Company Page follower growth and demographics
- Company Page content engagement and reach
- Employee statistics and trends
- Sponsored content performance
- Target audience demographics and interests
- Competitor following and engagement
- Industry news and discussions
- Lead generation and sales opportunities
- Talent brand awareness and recruiting metrics
This broad range of LinkedIn data can be analyzed to find opportunities to improve brand awareness, generate more leads, recruit top talent, understand customer demographics, gain competitive intelligence, and benchmark performance. The ability to track metrics over time is key for measuring progress and ROI.
How to Export LinkedIn Company Page Data
One of the most valuable sources of LinkedIn metrics is your Company Page. Here are some ways to pull useful data and statistics from your LinkedIn Company Page:
Export follower demographics
Your Company Page followers provide a demographic snapshot of who is interested in your brand. To see follower demographic data:
- Go to your LinkedIn Company Page
- Click on the ‘Followers’ tab
- Click the ‘People’ drop down menu
- Select ‘Export’ to download the data into a CSV file
This will provide details on each follower including job title, industry, seniority, location, and more. You can analyze trends across your followers to understand your target audience on LinkedIn.
View Company Page analytics
The LinkedIn Page analytics dashboard provides data on your followers growth, content impressions and engagement, website visits, and more. To access:
- Go to your Company Page
- Click ‘Analytics’ in the admin toolbar
- Select the date range to analyze
- Review data and visualizations on followers, post impressions, engagement, clicks, etc.
Monitoring your LinkedIn analytics regularly can help spot trends and opportunities to improve your Page strategy.
Export Company Page visitor demographics
You can also export data on the people who have visited your Company Page to view their professional details with this process:
- Go to your Company Page
- Click on the ‘Visitors’ tab
- Click the ‘People’ drop down menu
- Select ‘Export’ to download the data as a CSV file
Having visitor demographic data enables you to better understand your LinkedIn audience and align your content and messaging appropriately.
Extracting Competitor Data on LinkedIn
Monitoring competitor LinkedIn activity can provide valuable insights to help benchmark your own performance and inform your strategy. Here are some tips for extracting competitor data:
Compare follower counts
A quick way to get competitor follower data is to navigate to their Company Pages and note their follower number. Comparing this to your own follower count can give a sense of how your brand awareness stacks up.
Review competitor employee statistics
Looking at the size of a competitor’s LinkedIn company page gives useful context on their resources and reach potential. Employee statistics are shown on the ‘About’ tab of Company Pages.
Analyze competitor content engagement
You can export competitor Company Page posts to view engagement levels. This provides benchmarks to compare against your own content efforts. To export posts:
- Go to the competitor Company Page
- Click the ‘Posts’ tab
- Click the ‘Export LinkedIn posts’ option
- Save the .csv file with post data including likes, comments, clicks, etc.
Regularly checking competitor post engagement can help motivate your own content efforts on LinkedIn.
Follow competitor employees
Following key employees and influencers at competitor companies enables you to monitor their activity and get insights into their content strategy and approach. Their posts and engagement can provide useful checkpoints for your own team members on LinkedIn.
Extracting Audience Demographic Data
LinkedIn provides a wealth of demographic data that can be extracted to better understand your target audience. Here are some options for gathering audience statistics:
Export LinkedIn audience lists
Saved audience lists let you export demographic details on your target audience groups on LinkedIn. To export a list:
- Go to the ‘Audience Manager’ under ‘Advertising’
- Click the name of the target audience list you want to export
- Click ‘Export’ and choose either ‘Standard Export’ or ‘Facebook Export’
This provides professional demographic details on the members of your audience list that can be analyzed further to align your marketing.
View audience insights
Within the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, the ‘Audience Insights’ tab provides aggregated statistics on your target audience’s professional status, seniority, industry, location, and other attributes. This can supplement exported list data.
Reference LinkedIn member demographics
Exporting and reviewing profiles of your ideal customers on LinkedIn can provide helpful demographic insights. Looking at common attributes of your best audience members can better inform your targeting.
Monitoring Lead Generation and Sales Metrics
LinkedIn provides lead generation and sales tracking tools to help extract data on prospect engagement and pipeline opportunities:
View LinkedIn conversation metrics
You can export data on InMail messages and conversations with prospects to assess engagement levels. To download:
- Go to the ‘Messages’ section
- Click the dropdown arrow next to a conversation
- Select ‘Download conversation’
This allows you to track response rates, conversation frequency, and message effectiveness over time.
Review LinkedIn campaign status
In your LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you can view performance stats for sponsored content and ads. Metrics include impressions, clicks, engagement, conversions, and more. Regularly assessing campaign metrics helps identify top-performing initiatives to expand.
Monitor LinkedIn Matched Audiences performance
Matched Audiences lets you target ads to website visitors, contacts, or leads. You can view metrics on how your Matched Audiences segments are engaging to optimize your ads and spending.
Analyze lead and account records
Using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can view pipeline data on prospects to assess deal size, close dates, and revenue potential. Tracking this over time shows progress towards quota and funnel optimization opportunities.
Pulling Recruiting and Talent Brand Metrics
LinkedIn provides useful data on your employer brand awareness and recruiting effectiveness that should be monitored frequently:
Assess LinkedIn Life Page followers
Your LinkedIn Life Page houses career opportunities and provides insights on those interested in your company as an employer. Analyze follower growth and demographics to gauge talent brand awareness.
Review follower sources and content engagement
The Page analytics for your LinkedIn Life Page show how followers are discovering your company and what content resonates. This helps refine your recruiting content strategy.
Monitor applicant sources
LinkedIn Recruiter provides reporting on where your job applicants are coming from, whether LinkedIn, company career sites, job boards, etc. Track this to see which sources yield the best candidates.
Analyze hiring metrics
Tools like LinkedIn Recruiter allow you to view metrics on roles filled, time-to-hire, pipeline status, and more. Regularly tracking hiring KPIs helps ensure your recruiting process is optimized effectively.
Tips for Effective LinkedIn Data Analysis
Once you’ve extracted LinkedIn data, proper analysis and reporting are key for turning those metrics into actionable insights. Here are some best practices:
- Clean and preprocess data to remove errors or inconsistencies
- Analyze trends month-over-month and year-over-year
- Visualize data through charts and graphs for easy consumption
- Highlight key takeaways and recommendations
- Share reports internally to align your team
- Build dashboards to continuously monitor important LinkedIn KPIs
- A/B test changes to identify opportunities to improve
- Incorporate insights into your LinkedIn and marketing strategies
Conclusion
LinkedIn offers an abundance of valuable data – the key is knowing how to effectively extract and analyze it. By pulling metrics around audience demographics, content engagement, company brand awareness, lead generation, recruiting, and more, marketers can make data-driven decisions to optimize their LinkedIn and integrated marketing strategies for success.
Consistently monitoring performance against key LinkedIn benchmarks and company KPIs provides crucial visibility that will help fuel competitive advantage and growth.