LinkedIn is one of the biggest B2B networking platforms. Most professionals around the world have a LinkedIn presence.
Surveys say that 77% of B2B marketers vouch that LinkedIn is the most effective social media platform for B2B marketing.
Not only that, the platform gets 15 times more impressions than job postings on job boards. Most professionals trust LinkedIn, which means leveraging the platform for influencer marketing will only reap benefits for your brand.
The platform helps to connect business leaders, professionals, and decision-makers to discuss industry trends and exchange business ideas while creating their personal brands and growing their professional journeys.
Most recruiters browse through LinkedIn to find suitable candidates.
In fact, LinkedIn mentions that 93% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find their next hires.
LinkedIn is a rich community of professional experts, which makes it an ideal platform for B2B influencer marketing. In fact, LinkedIn runs its own “Top Voice” program that identifies and applauds professionals in their respective fields. So, if you’re looking for expert B2B influencers for your brand campaign, LinkedIn is the ideal place to get started.
However, not every influencer is meant for your campaign. Neither every candidate looking for job is the best fit for your requirement. That’s why you need to analyze the LinkedIn profile of the influencer or the candidate to understand fit.
In this article, we will explore how to analyze a LinkedIn profile and share tool suggestions to help you find the right LinkedIn influencer across industry and demographics for your next brand campaign.
Why LinkedIn Analytics is Crucial for Marketing and Recruitment
Whether you’re looking for a LinkedIn influencer for your next B2B marketing campaign or searching for the right candidate, analyzing LinkedIn profiles is critical to making the right decision. A thorough profile analysis guarantees a good ROI.
Authenticity
A thorough profile analysis helps you understand if the creator is genuine. A complete profile, with a clear headshot picture of the creator, regularly created posts, and engagement with others is a sign that the creator is authentic.
Personal branding
Analyzing LinkedIn profiles gives detailed insights into the candidate’s profile. If you’re looking for a LinkedIn influencer, profile analysis helps you shortlist the right influencer for your marketing campaigns.
If you are looking for candidates for recruitment purposes, a LinkedIn profile analysis helps you understand the candidates’ experience, gauge their industry knowledge, and determine how active they are on social media.
Gauge industry knowledge
LinkedIn profile analysis also helps you understand if the candidate suits your requirements. The kind of content they create, how they engage with other people, and their ability to spark conversation —- all help you pick the right fit for your brand.
Engagement and networking
If you’re hunting for the right influencer, you must know their engagement and networking capabilities before pitching them to your brand.
Analyzing their content also helps you understand how they fit your brand tonality. By analyzing their profile, you can understand the kind of audience they engage with and then decide if they are engaging with your target audience.
Key Metrics to Consider in LinkedIn Profile Analysis
Some of the key tracking metrics that you must consider while conducting LinkedIn profile analysis -
Followers
This metric signifies how many people follow the influencer. It gives a fair idea about the creator's reach and popularity. Using this metric, you can choose a micro-influencer, macro-influencer, or mega-influencer.
Follower demographics
This metric analyzes the creator’s LinkedIn followers based on their demographics, such as industries, seniority levels, and locations.
By tracking this metric, you can understand whether you’re selecting the right influencer.
Engagement rate
This is an important metric that helps you choose the industry's best creator.
For LinkedIn, a 2% engagement rate is considered good, and anything between 2-5% engagement rate means the creator’s audience is constantly engaged with their posts. You can determine the engagement rate using the formula —
(Total engagement/ Total impressions) * 100
Content performance
This is another key metric that gives you valuable insights into their content performance, such as average likes, shares, and comments per post and how frequently the creator publishes relevant content.
Reach
A thorough profile analysis can help you understand the reach of the influencer for sponsored posts.
Growth
This useful metric helps you to determine the growth of the influencer over a period of time.
Keywords
Analyzing the keywords used by the influencers most frequently in their posts helps you understand whether they are a good fit for your brand.
Collaboration
Thoroughly analyzing profiles and scrutinizing posts tells you the brands the creator has worked with, the results they have achieved, and how their followers feel about it.
This is a valuable metric that helps you understand the probability of success of your partnership.
Manual Methods for LinkedIn Profile Analysis
Now that you know why LinkedIn profile analysis is important, let's understand how to conduct it manually.
Check profile photo
Visit the candidate’s LinkedIn profile and check for the profile photo.
A genuine profile should have a clear headshot photo of the person. Note the background photo, too. Is it relevant to the profile?
A clear headshot photo is the first thing to look for in a LinkedIn profile
Check for headline
Check if a headline is present that is legit to the person’s profile.
The headline should have a profile summary of the person with the professional brand statement.
Look for about section
Check the About section for a profile summary. It would look something like this.
A detailed About section conveys authenticity
Check for posting frequency
Check for posting frequency, especially if you’re looking for influencers for LinkedIn influencer marketing. This proves how active the person is on the platform.
Posting frequently is important for an active LinkedIn account
Analyze engagement rate
Next, check for their engagement rate. You can do this by taking the top 10 posts and creating an average of how many likes and comments the 10 posts have received.
A few examples of well-engaged posts
Network analysis is important
For network analysis, check the number of connections, profiles of the connections, the job titles, and the industries they are in.
Snapshot of network analysis
Analyze comments
Analyze the comments to understand the kind of engagement the creator has with their audience. Meaningful, relevant, and opinionated comments mean the audience is “really” engaged with the creator. Here’s an example of a thoughtful comment:
Analyze content types
Analyze the content types to gauge the common content format the creator posts. Is it textual, images, carousals, video, or a mix of all? Knowing this will help you pick the right influencer.
Analyze content strategies and themes
Analyzing the content themes is a good way to understand under which buckets/ content pillars the creator creates most of their content. It is also a great way to judge the creator-brand fit.
Automating LinkedIn Profile Analysis with Phyllo
With the LinkedIn profile analysis feature, you can discover the creator’s LinkedIn profile right on Phyllo.
Understand the follower demographics
Where are the influencer's followers from? What are their job titles and seniority levels?
Automating LinkedIn profile analysis can help you understand all these details.
Understand the audience growth
By automating the LinkedIn profile analysis, you can easily understand the rate at which the creator’s followers increase.
Understand reach and engagement
Automating the LinkedIn profile analysis is a great way to understand the reach of the sponsored post, the quality of comments and interactions, and the type of content the influencer posts.
By automating the whole process, you can save time and cost while getting accurate analysis information and choosing the right influencer for your marketing strategy or the right candidate for hiring.
How Phyllo Enhances LinkedIn Profile Analysis for Influencer Marketing
With Phllo, you can conduct LinkedIn profile analysis in just a few minutes. This powerful tool saves time by eliminating the need for manual search and automating the whole process.
You can use different search filters to refine your search. For example, to shortlist creators, you can specify the follower count, post frequency, engagement rate, etc.. You can also compare the creators to choose the best fit.
So, if you want to find creators with 50k to 500k followers, you can simply input the information into the tool, which will automate your search process.
The tool offers a dozen other filters you can check simultaneously. For example, you can choose a location, topics they talk about commonly, hashtags frequently used, engagement rates, average comments, and shares.
This is an example of a creator search result where the follower count is between 50K and 100K, the location is set in the United States, the Engagement rate is more than 5%, and creates content around finance and technology.
From the filtered result, you can view all the profile details of the LinkedIn users, including their job title, company, follower count, connections, and engagement rate, giving you a strong sense of whether they fit your brand campaign.
See the tool in action-
The tool lets you do a profile deep dive, where you can access the LinkedIn bio, personal description, location, spoken languages, availability of contact details, etc.
You can also explore the creator’s content performance in detail, such as followers, average comments per post, average share per post, total cost, engagement rate, and average likes per post. You can also get a peek at their frequently published content.
The tool allows you to browse their top-performing content and most recent posts. This is a great way to get a sense of their current engagement and content style so that you can pick the best creator who already aligns with your brand tone and style.
You can further explore their professional background, including work experience and education.
The dashboard also displays their frequently used hashtags, most talked about topics and notable mentions.
If all these criteria meet your requirements, you can easily add the creator to your list or browse further.
Excited to try this all-new LinkedIn profile analysis tool? Get in touch for a demo today.