LinkedIn insights are a great way to gain valuable information about your professional network, company page performance, and more. However, searching LinkedIn insights effectively requires understanding the different options available. Let’s go over how to search LinkedIn insights step-by-step.
What are LinkedIn insights?
LinkedIn insights provide data-driven analytics about your LinkedIn presence and activity. There are three main categories of LinkedIn insights:
- My Network insights – Analytics about your 1st-degree connections, including growth, engagement, and composition.
- Company Page insights – Performance metrics for your LinkedIn company pages, including follower growth, content engagement, and visitor demographics.
- Professional insights – Trends in hiring, compensation, skills, education, and more for different industries, locations, companies, titles, and skills.
LinkedIn insights help optimize your LinkedIn usage by identifying opportunities and providing benchmarks. The data is displayed through simple charts and graphs, making it easy to analyze trends and patterns at a glance.
Accessing LinkedIn insights
To start using LinkedIn insights, you first need to access the insights dashboard. Here’s how:
- Log in to your LinkedIn account on desktop.
- Go to the “Me” icon at the top of your homepage.
- Select “View insights” from the dropdown menu.
This will bring you to your LinkedIn insights overview page. The navigation bar at the top allows you to switch between My Network insights, Company Page insights, and Professional insights.
Searching your network insights
Let’s look at how to search your network insights for specific information. Your connections, engagement, and growth analytics can be filtered in several ways:
Time frame
Adjust the time frame to view monthly, quarterly, or annual trends. The default is typically the last 30 days.
Connections
Search for metrics related to 1st, 2nd & 3rd, and all connections. This lets you analyze different segments of your network.
Locations
Filter connections and growth by geographic locations like country, state, city, and region.
Companies
View insights by company to see connections from specific employers.
Industries
Search by industry to understand which sectors your connections work in.
Schools
Alumni-based searching lets you see the educational background of your connections.
Skills
Skill filters provide insight into the expertise present within your network.
Searching company page insights
Company page insights have different filtering capabilities than network insights. Here are the main ways to search company page analytics:
Time frame
Again, adjust the date range to compare different periods for follower growth, content engagement, etc.
Follower locations
See what countries, cities, regions, and states your followers are based in.
Follower seniority
Filter by entry-level, manager-level, director-level, etc. followers.
Follower functions
Search by functions like Engineering, Marketing, Sales, HR, etc.
Content types
Analyze engagement for different content like articles, images, videos, and documents.
Searching professional insights
Professional insights have higher-level filters for industry trends and benchmarks, including:
Countries
Compare hiring rates, compensation, skills demand, and more for specific countries.
Regions
Drill down into states/provinces or cities within a country.
Industries
Search professional insights for industries like tech, finance, healthcare, etc.
Company sizes
Segment data by company size ranges like 1-10 employees, 10-50 employees, 50-200 employees, etc.
Titles and skills
Look at insights for specific job titles and skills.
Time frames
As always, adjust the time period to identify trends over weeks, months, quarters, or years.
Tips for searching insights effectively
Here are some top tips for searching LinkedIn insights productively:
- Start broad – Filter down from a wide initial search.
- Leverage benchmarks – Compare your metrics against industry and location baselines.
- Follow trends – Look at data over time to spot positive and negative momentum.
- Compare segments – Break down results by locations, skills, companies, etc.
- Ask questions – Approach each search with specific questions you want answered.
Analyzing your LinkedIn insights
After running your LinkedIn insights search, the next step is analyzing the results. Here are some ways to effectively analyze your insights data:
- Identify outliers – Look for peaks, valleys, and unexpected variations in metrics.
- Compare metrics – Determine relationships between different analytics like follower growth and engagement.
- Summarize key findings – Note down main takeaways and conclusions from the data.
- Share visually – Use screenshots, exports, or summaries to present insights to stakeholders.
- Make recommendations – Suggest actions based on the insights like targeting certain skills or geographies.
Acting on LinkedIn insights
The real value of LinkedIn insights comes from acting on the information to improve results. Some ways to act on insights include:
- Optimizing LinkedIn content based on top-performing post types, formats, and topics.
- Building connections in geographies and industries with engagement potential.
- Developing skills and expertise to align with demand signals from your network.
- Joining relevant LinkedIn groups where targeted members are active.
- Engaging dormant connections to reactivate relationships.
Use cases for LinkedIn insights
LinkedIn insights have many potential use cases, such as:
- Tracking individual LinkedIn profile performance over time.
- Informing content strategy and posting cadence for company pages.
- Benchmarking performance against competitors and industry standards.
- Identifying skill gaps to guide learning and development.
- Monitoring employee brand and recruiting engagement metrics.
- Gauging audience interest to prioritize product and service offerings.
Limitations of LinkedIn insights
While highly useful, LinkedIn insights do have some limitations to be aware of:
- Data lags – Insights may not fully reflect very recent changes.
- Sampling bias – The network ecosystem may not represent all target audiences.
- Self-reported info – Details like skills and roles may not always be accurate.
- Narrow focus – Insights only cover activity within the LinkedIn platform itself.
Getting help with LinkedIn insights
If you need any help navigating LinkedIn insights, here are some recommendations:
- LinkedIn Help Center – Product guides, FAQs, and how-to articles.
- LinkedIn account executive – If available, your assigned rep can provide support.
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions – Self-serve ads platform with onboarding resources.
- LinkedIn Sales Solutions – B2B sales tools and training materials.
- LinkedIn Learning – Expert-led courses on using LinkedIn effectively.
Conclusion
LinkedIn insights empower you to maximize the value of your professional network data. By mastering search techniques, analyzing your results, and acting on the insights, you can boost brand awareness, reach your target audience, evaluate content performance, identify partnership opportunities, and much more. Focus on a specific objective, leverage the filters effectively, track trends over time, benchmark against standard metrics, and translate the numbers into real-world impact.