Measuring Your Own Impact

Sharing without ever looking at what happened is how people lose interest in advocacy. The numbers are the interesting part, once you know which ones mean something. This article covers where to find your own results, what each number is actually telling you, and how to tell whether you are improving.

Find your numbers

Two places, for two different questions.

• Activity answers "how am I doing overall." It shows engagement, clicks, reach and your share history over time. See View Your Content and Stats Using Activity.
• A single share answers "how did that one do." See View Performance on a Share You Made.

Both update as engagement arrives, so a post checked an hour after publishing will look very different from the same post two days later.

Understand what each number is telling you

They are not equally useful, and the biggest one is the least useful.

• Engagements are reactions, comments and reshares. The most honest indicator that something landed, and comments count for far more than reactions.
• Clicks are people who left the post to go and read the thing. The strongest signal available when your goal is traffic, and the hardest to get.
• Reach is roughly how many people could have seen it, based on the size of the networks involved.
• Impressions are an estimate, not a number the network reports back. It is calculated from engagement, so treat it as a directional figure and not a fact. Impression Analytics explains the calculation and why it works this way.

Judge yourself against yourself

Comparing your numbers to a colleague's tells you very little, because network size, role and subject vary enormously. Comparing this month to last month tells you a lot.

Three comparisons worth making:

1. Engagements per post, this month against last. Rising means your content is getting better, or your audience is getting more relevant, or both.
2. Comments as a share of engagements. Rising means you are provoking conversation rather than collecting reactions, which is the harder and more valuable thing.
3. Clicks, when the post was meant to drive a click. Falling clicks on link posts usually means the commentary is not doing its job.

Read who, not just how many

The single most useful thing in your numbers is not a count, it is a list. Knowing which people engaged, and where they work, turns a metric into something you can act on: a conversation to start, a connection to make, a follow-up that is not cold.

Building Your Network covers reading that list and what to do with it.

Know what is not counted

Worth knowing so you are not confused by a gap:

• Posts you write directly on LinkedIn, outside EveryoneSocial, are not tracked here.
• Engagement on other people's posts is not counted as your activity, even though it is one of the most valuable things you can do.
• Different networks report back different amounts of data, so a share to one network may show less detail than another. See LinkedIn Share Components and Share to X.

FAQ

How do I know if my sharing is working?

Look at engagements per post and comments as a proportion of them, compared against your own previous months. Rising engagement with a growing share of comments is the clearest sign of progress.

Why are my impressions so much higher than my engagements?

Impressions are estimated from engagement rather than reported by the network, so the two move together by design. Use engagements and clicks when you want a counted number. See Impression Analytics.

What is a good number of engagements?

There is no universal figure, because it depends on your network and subject. Your own trend over two or three months is the only benchmark worth using.

Why does my post show fewer clicks than I expected?

Link posts reach fewer people than other formats, and a post whose commentary does not give a reason to click will not get clicks. See Formats and Reach on LinkedIn.

Do my numbers include what I post directly on LinkedIn?

No. Only shares made through EveryoneSocial are tracked.