Your Personal Publishing Statistics: More Fiction Than Fact

Note that when you post or publish on LinkedIn that LinkedIn will show you some statistics when you either click on the number of views, or click on “see stats”

In addition to the total views, reactions, comments, and reshares, you can see the top eight each of:

• Which companies your viewers are from
• The titles for viewers
• The geographic areas your visitors are from
• And how they found your article (note this applies only to articles or newsletters. It does not apply to posts)

But there is one huge honking asterisk:

If one person comes back multiple times to comment, reply to comments, or re-read the comments thread, they are counted as a “view” each time they return. I have had this happen multiple times: LinkedIn tells me that people from “XYZ company” viewed my article 17 times. Which is great until I check out  XYZ company and find they are a consultancy with one consultant.

This has the potential to skew everything else we see in these statistics. The example I cited of the one person company is one I could easily identify, but that is a rarity. What of all the other companies listed? What if the twenty-five CEO’s who viewed the article or post were all the same CEO? What if the thirty people from Deloitte were really just two people from Deloitte who really liked my content and came back a couple dozen times? And what do they do at Deloitte? There is no correlation that tells me the Deloitte people were critical decision makers or contract employees who may be gone next week.

And of course, all these additional statistics – companies, titles, locations and sources are based on views, and as long time readers of my content know, the definition of a view is sketchy at best on LinkedIn. 

So my suggestion is that you take the following statistics seriously: reactions, comments and reshares. Everything else on this page could best be described as infotainment.