Most of us think that LinkedIn is the social media platform where people go to find jobs.
Actually, it is the perfect network for B2Bs to promote their services and products, crafting a powerful LinkedIn strategy.
Having an ongoing LinkedIn campaign requires a lot of team effort, especially when it comes to the part where you have to assess your content’s performance.
A LinkedIn audit is needed to learn what worked best for your LinkedIn campaign and what changes you need to make in your marketing strategy.
Today we’ll learn how to conduct a LinkedIn audit and why it’s important for your brand.
Let’s dive in!
Audit your LinkedIn profile
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How to conduct a LinkedIn audit - a complete guide
2.1. Set your LinkedIn goals
2.2. Analyze your LinkedIn profile: profile image, banner image, headline
2.3. Use good SEO practices when it comes to your LinkedIn profile
2.4. Rate your team
2.5. Use LinkedIn's Employee Advocacy Program
2.6. Identify the correct type of content for your brand on LinkedIn
2.7. Check competitors’ performance
1. What is a LinkedIn audit?
A LinkedIn audit is the process through which you assess your LinkedIn content’s performance, by looking at data.
This is how you find out what types of posts work best for your brand.
The results you get after conducting a LinkedIn audit help you develop a new content plan or adjust your current strategy.
2. How to perform a LinkedIn audit
By learning how to conduct a LinkedIn audit, you figure out what are the steps you need to take in order to improve your LinkedIn content.
This step-by-step guide on how to develop a LinkedIn audit will help you ace your LinkedIn marketing game.
2.1. Set your LinkedIn goals
If you know from the start what you want to achieve through your LinkedIn content, you will know how to plan your journey towards your goal.
You just have to ask yourself what’s your brand’s purpose on LinkedIn and everything will fall into place when crafting your content plan.
One of your goals might be to increase brand awareness or boost your sales. Regardless of what you choose to focus on, you have to write it down and then establish what steps you need to take to accomplish what you want.
2.2. Analyze your LinkedIn profile: profile image, banner image, headline
Next, you have to assess what you already have. The first impression matters. Always.
That’s why you should make everything sync with your brand’s values, from your LinkedIn profile picture to your headline, description and Overview section.
- Profile picture
A clean, professional photo will help your profile stand out from the crowd. As a brand, I recommend you to use your logo as a profile picture.
- Banner photo
If you haven’t designed your own banner image yet, that time has come. Use an actionable insight about your brand, a short CTA and also include your logo.
Yes, it’s that simple. These are just the right elements so that you have a cover photo that will steal everyone’s attention when coming across your LinkedIn profile.
Since Socialinider is an analytics tool, we've created our banner to let people know that they can use our tool to discover in-depth social media insights.
- Overview section
The overview section is essential when it comes to search on LinkedIn. By using just the right keywords,  users will easily find your brand’s profile.
Like an Instagram bio, your brand's LinkedIn overview section should be eye-catching and informative at the same time.
It should be able to hook future clients. You need to convince users that adding you to their LinkedIn connections is a great choice.
Let people know more about your brand, what you do, what products and services you provide, the link to your website, the industry you’re part of and everything about how you founded the brand.
This is also the place where you can place a call to action, such as:
- Please visit our website...
- Questions? Please email us at...
- Follow us here for daily tips
2.3. Use good SEO practices when it comes to your LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn will land on your brand’s LinkedIn page if you make good use of attributes and keywords.
This is what will convince the LinkedIn algorithm to push your page forward, drawing users towards your brand.
In order to do so, you need to use search engine optimization (SEO) properly to make sure users will easily find you.
2.4. Rate your team
Your team is the reason why you’re here and you should be proud and grateful. Make sure their LinkedIn profiles are spotless, just like the one of your company’s page.
Have you ever wonder how does your team look to a potential client surveying your company page?
Do they have profile pictures? Are they tagged on your page? You might think that these are only details, but all these details matter when it comes to your brand.
Make sure your team has a presence on LinkedIn because they are your number one ambassadors to promote your brand's message.
Your team members should have a profile picture with their face, making them more recognizable and trustworthy.
If users can associate a face to a name, they will be more tempted to talk to your employees.
2.5. Use LinkedIn's Employee Advocacy Program
Checking the performance of your employees’ LinkedIn posts is as important as looking at analytics for your company’s LinkedIn page.
Before you overthink this, think about this: your employees are your biggest fans. Or, at least, they should be if they love their job.
It’s your responsibility to help them love their job in order for your company to prosper.
Your employees are your brand’s greatest advocates. And this should reflect in the way they talk about your brand.
LinkedIn has an employee advocacy program you could use, through which you can see the performance of your employees’ posts about your company.
This part should definitely be included in your LinkedIn audit.
To do this, you can either use LinkedIn’s in-built feature for employee advocacy or a third-party tool like Shield.
This will help you increase brand awareness and build a solid community around your brand.
Emma Heath, one of our podcast guests, speaks about the employee advocacy program on LinkedIn.
It is not enough to check your brand’s LinkedIn content performance when performing a LinkedIn audit. Your employees should also post quality content that is in line with your brand’s value.
2.6. Identify the correct type of content for your brand on LinkedIn
Judging by your audience’s preferences, after a session of “trial and error”, you will find out what their favourite type of content is for LinkedIn.
By looking at followers’ demographics and assessing the performance of your LinkedIn posts via LinkedIn analytics, you can easily find out what’s your top performing type of content, depending on your industry.
This will help you focus on a particular type of content. Based on our recent LinkedIn study, we found out that native documents generate 5 x more clicks than any other type of content.
This is really encouraging brands to direct their creativity towards developing this type of content.
However, the type of content on LinkedIn that has the highest engagement is video, with a value of 3.18%.
By using a LinkedIn audit tool, like Socialinsider, you get to see all your posts’ performance.
This will help you set the pace for your brand and figure out what works and what doesn’t work for your brand.
2.7. Check competitors’ performance
Looking at your LinkedIn competitors should also be part of your LinkedIn audit. However, you can only do this by using a LinkedIn audit tool to look at their posts’ metrics.
By looking at what your competitors are doing, you will find out where you’re at in terms of performance in your industry and niche.
How are you supposed to advance through your niche and make space for a successful campaign if you don’t know where you stand now?
Look at what your competitors are doing, by analyzing their posts, the way they interact with users and how engaging their posts are.
This part of your LinkedIn audit will help you improve your LinkedIn content strategy and become a fierce competitor for others from your niche.
3. Benefits of a LinkedIn audit
Performing a LinkedIn audit can benefit your LinkedIn campaign strategy.
Here are just a few of the advantages of LinkedIn audit, to convince you to conduct one regularly.
- You will know if your brand is on the right track, according to your plan towards your main LinkedIn strategy goal
- You will get to know your audience by looking at demographics and finding out what their needs are based on their interactions with your posts
- You will get data about post performance, learning what type of content is the most engaging one for your audience
- You get to know what your competitors are doing and what’s their overall LinkedIn performance
4. Find the right LinkedIn audit tool
Looking at data has never been easier with a social media analytics tool that highlights the importance of metrics and offers you actionable insights.
With Socialinsider you get to check a lot of LinkedIn metrics for your business page like:
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Follower growth
- Top posts
- Video views
- Demographics
What most people don’t know is that Socialinsider is more than an analytics tool. It also offers data about campaign strategy, reporting, benchmarking and competitors analysis.
Let’s look at post performance in Posts. I decided to group posts in a campaign so I tagged our “5 in 5” posts where we offer users news about the latest updates in social media.
After a quick search, I found out that there are 46 posts out of 300 posts tagged in this campaign.
Here you can see individual metrics for every post tagged in this campaign. You can check engagement rate, impressions, likes, comments, shares and engagement evolution.
The insights you discover can help you better understand your audience and craft engaging content for them.
This part of your LinkedIn audit helps you increase brand awareness, build a loyal community around your brand and increase sales through your LinkedIn campaigns.
5. LinkedIn audit template to simplify the process
Since I talked and talked about how simple your LinkedIn audit could be, here is the proof.
I prepared a LinkedIn audit template for you to simplify your work.
However, depending on your brand’s LinkedIn objectives and your focus metrics, you can always make all the adjustments you consider necessary on the above-presented LinkedIn audit template when creating your LinkedIn performance report.
Final thoughts
After going through all the above steps for your LinkedIn audit, make sure you establish what improvements you need to make for your LinkedIn page.
The LinkedIn audit will let the good and the bad surface to help you adjust your content strategy and be one step ahead of your competition.
Use these insightful guide to develop a strong marketing strategy that could increase brand awareness, your community and the number of leads.
