Okay, maybe LinkedIn doesn’t offer this many options, but it’s a lot better than it used to be.
LinkedIn is quick to feature the number of views your content has received, regardless of what type of content you have such as posts or videos. So I thought we could talk about views and their value.
Views are really what the advertising industry refers to as impressions. Using an example from the ad industry actually illustrates this idea really well. A company, say Budweiser, wants to advertise Bud Lite. They will contact a television network in order to advertise on their football broadcasts. The television network will tell Budweiser that their 1pm football game reaches ten million people. If Budweiser puts an ad on that broadcast, the ad is said to have had ten million impressions. Now, of those ten million people, how many of them actually saw the ad? Think of yourself when you watch broadcast TV. In an hour, you may be shown fifteen or twenty ads. How many of them did you actually watch? This is why they are called impressions. The number of impressions is the number of people who could have seen the Bud Lite commercial.
I would also point out here that this helps to explain why we see the same commercials over and over again. The advertising companies want to make sure that at some point we see their commercial, and the only way to guarantee that is through repetition.
So how does this apply to our content on LinkedIn?
When we publish on LinkedIn, LinkedIn puts our content in the feeds of other LinkedIn users. This is the content that you see on your LinkedIn homepage, and the content in your feed as you scroll down. If you scroll down past fifteen posts, LinkedIn will register you as having “viewed” those fifteen posts and compile those views for reporting back to the authors.
The bottom line is a view means someone had the opportunity to see your post in their feed. It does not mean they opened it, or that they read it. Seeing the number of views makes us think that number of people read our post. They may have.
So what can we do about this?
LinkedIn Newsletters.
For my money, the best type of content on LinkedIn is a LinkedIn newsletter.
Newsletters get the same distribution as regular posts – that is put in the feeds of some LinkedIn members – plus there are three good additional reasons I like Newsletters:
1) Guaranteed delivery. LinkedIn notifies – not just puts in your feed but notifies – your subscribers that a new issue is available. And this includes email notifications. If you are a subscriber to this newsletter, you (should have!) received a notification from LinkedIn.
2) You can see who has subscribed to your Newsletter. I will confess it’s not easy – it’s actually pretty awkward – but it can be done.
3) You can see how many clicks and opens you got for each issue. This is the biggie, and the big advantage over regular posts. As I like to say, a view means someone has the opportunity to see and read your content, but a click signals their intent to open and read your content. I would much rather have a hundred clicks than a hundred views.
I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/
Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month.
