Have you been building your personal brand on LinkedIn and would like to optimize your performance?

Instead, maybe you are a small business, entrepreneur or content creator and you can’t afford to waste time and money on poorly created content.

If so, its essential to reflect on what drives your content’s performance through analytics.

And to do analytics right, you need data. In this article, we’ll show you how to get your LinkedIn data, both to assess your privacy footprint and for analysis. We’ll take a look at getting personal information through to advanced, detailed metrics.

There are three main ways to get access to your data on LinkedIn:

1. LinkedIn Personal Information Request
2. LinkedIn inbuilt analytics
3. 3rd Party Analytics solutions

Let’s dive into each of them, look at the pros and cons and see what types of data you can access via each solution.

Get a copy of your LinkedIn data

Due to privacy laws like GDPR, a wealth of data is now available for free, on request, through LinkedIn. To access your LinkedIn personal data, follow these steps:

1. Go to LinkedIn.com and log in to your account.

2. Click on the Me icon in the top right corner of the page and select Settings & Privacy from the dropdown menu.

3. In the left-hand menu, click on the Data privacy tab.

4. Under the Data privacy tab, you will see a section called How LinkedIn uses your data. Click on the View your data link.

5. This will take you to a page where you can view and manage your LinkedIn data. From here, you can see your profile information, posts and activity, connections, messages, and other data associated with your LinkedIn account.

6. You can also use this page to download a copy of your LinkedIn data. To do this, click on “Get a copy of your data” button and follow the instructions to download your data. You’ll get a zip file containing all of the data.

It’s a pretty simple process. But unfortunately, not all data is available. This data dump contains information about who and what you interacted with. It’s useful but has limited value for analyzing your social performance.

What data is available via the LinkedIn data export?

The LinkedIn data export mainly contains information related to your privacy and security on the platform. It’s not really intended for analytics, but nonetheless there are some interesting pieces of information available to you including:

• Connections: Who you’ve connected with and on what date. See what companies and titles are more likely to connect with you.
• Comments: Any comments you’ve made on other peoples posts. At Seenly, we treat commenting as we do any other part of our social strategy. With careful statistical analysis, we can link our comments to our social channel engagements and understand how they impact our brand.
• Reactions: useful for analyzing your consistency and engagement on LinkedIn
• Shares
• Votes: any votes you made in polls
• Logins: again useful for analyzing consistency
• Invitations: understand your success rate for invitation acceptance
• Messages: Test your in-mail strategy, tone and style. Understand how your contacts react to you
• And others…

As you can see, there is some useful information available. However, its all about you. It doesn’t really tell you anything about your engagement levels, and that’s what is really important.

How to use LinkedIn analytics

How can you get access to this information? Well, LinkedIn itself is a start. LinkedIn provides some information available through the browser front-end.

To access these analytics, firstly navigate to your profile page. Once there, you will see a section titled “Analytics”. There are three clickable options; “Profile Views”, “Impressions” and “Search Appearances”.

If you click on one of these options, you’ll see a chart showing the specific metric over time.
It will look a little something like this:

Via the other links, you’ll have access to impressions and search appearances too, as well as demographic information about the people visiting your page.

3rd Party Analytics & Insights for LinkedIn

If you would like to get serious about measuring your performance and understanding what works and what doesn’t, you’ll need a third party solutions. There are a number of 3rd party software providers which have inexpensive options for extracting and analyzing your analytics.

• Seenly
• Hootsuite
• Inlytics
• Shield AI
• and others…

We won’t analyze the pros and cons of the individual services now, its beyond the scope of the article.

What do 3rd party tools provide?

With Seenly, you can track all of your historical metrics including shares, engagements, comments and reactions. We can also cross reference this information with your follower and connections counts to help you fully understand the impact of your actions on LinkedIn.

With Seenly Insight and other 3rd party tools, you can:

• Track your growth: Stay on track with everything visualized in beautiful charts and graphs. See how much progress you have made on all of your major social channels, watch them grow over time
• Monitor your posts with social listening: Use Seenly Insight to monitor all of your posts in real time with social listening. Using our easy to follow traffic light system, you can see whether your content’s engagement is fresh and growing, viral or stagnant. Understand everything at a glance
• Understand the sentiment of your commenters, on every post. Is your community happy with the content that you produce, or is it controversial? And how does that impact your engagement?
• Never miss a follower or commenter again! With your content growing so quickly, its easy to forget someone. Seenly Insight compiles a list of all your commenters and engagements so that you can quickly find out who you need to reach. This analytics feature is perfect for SDRs, entrepeneurs and small businesses.
• See what content resonates with your community. Measure, refine and improve!

Seenly is service that uses 100% LinkedIn approved API’s to access, store and analyze your data. We can and do only process data with your explicit consent, so sign up today and try it for yourself.

Summary

There you have it! In this article, we have looked at the three main ways to access and analyze your LinkedIn data. Firstly, you can download your personal data through the portal. It’s limited but still contains some useful information. Secondly, you can use LinkedIn’s in-built insights to provide some insight. Unfortunately, the small number of metrics and views mean that many users need a more in-depth, sophisticated service. Finally, you can turn to a third party provider such as Seenly.

Through Seenly, you can analyze and understand all your important metrics and continue to grow your personal or company brand.

Seenly Insight is available through our normal subscription, with a free trial, no credit card required.