Natasha Mahoney, Digital Manager

If you manage social media platforms, particularly those for B2B or professional services businesses, you’ll join me in lamenting LinkedIn’s follower analysis. While reporting on follower trends over time and net gains/losses, the inability to identify followers has made it difficult to know your audience — does the page have the right following or just a large / growing following?

Coupled with LinkedIn’s often difficult user experience; this can leave social media managers looking to third party services to analyse the data coming from LinkedIn in order to inform their content and engagement strategies.

However, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. LinkedIn has quietly introduced a new feature; visibility of who follows the company pages you manage, accessible with the click of a button.

Follower Analytics

Now, when you click the Followers tab in analytics, you’ll be able to see company followers in chronological order, as well as the month and year they followed the page. This will allow for much more in-depth audience analysis. The list can’t be downloaded or exported, but it’s an extra level of insight we’ve been missing.

This will help answer the question we hear most often from our clients; who is following our page and how do we best reach them?

Over the coming months, we should see businesses take this information and run with it. Understanding their existing audiences and either tailoring content more specifically to them or revising their social strategies to target new followers that fit their desired audience better. We’re looking forward to seeing how this changes the content strategies of the pages we follow.

Promoting your company page

In the same roll out, LinkedIn has also introduced some limits to how many times a company page manager can send out invitations to follow their company page. Allowing pages 100 credits per month with each invite costing one credit.

The new features add some interesting new options. While neither of them are set to transform your process, they do provide some additional considerations for building your audience.

Are there any other analytics tools you’d like to see social media platforms roll out?

Can we help you analyse your LinkedIn activity and reach your followers? If so, get in touch.