LinkedIn analytics can help small communications teams understand what’s working, what’s resonating and where to focus limited time and energy to achieve success. But dashboards full of numbers can just as easily create confusion as clarity.
At Agenda we help small charities with a light-touch approach to capturing and interpreting data. In this blog, we’ll draw on our experience of creating and analysing LinkedIn content for Gesher, a leading special school for children with autism and mild to moderate learning difficulties.
Why understanding your LinkedIn performance matters
For small comms teams, every post carries weight. Time is limited, capacity is tight and content often needs to serve multiple purposes at once:
Raising brand or issue awareness
Extending reach and building trust among core audiences
Supporting member, donor, staff and, in the case of Gesher, parent/pupil recruitment
Strengthening relationships with decision-makers.
Audiences on LinkedIn are not a single group – some will be finding you for the first time; others will have a new or growing relationship; some will have been part of your community for years.
Given the mix of why you’re posting and who you aim to reach, understanding how your content is performing is vital or you’ll find yourself:
Relying on gut instinct alone
Overvaluing the loudest reactions
Repeating what feels safe rather than what works
Having no way of pushing back on requests for content that doesn’t add value.
What LinkedIn analytics can do (and what they can’t)
Using analytics means you are asking contributors for content that works or content you deliberately want to test. Your contributors are often stretched too, so it’s important to be clear about why you’re asking and what you’re trying to achieve.
LinkedIn analytics don’t offer a magic formula but used well, help teams spot patterns, understand audience behaviour and make clearer choices.
For small teams, analytics are most useful when they help answer practical questions such as:
Are people seeing our content?
Are they engaging with it?
What types of posts do different jobs, and do them well?
You don’t need to track everything. A few well-chosen metrics can provide enough insight to inform decisions without adding extra work.
How to get started
1. Begin with clear questions
Before opening analytics, decide what you need to know and why. For example:
Which posts help us reach new audiences?
What content strengthens engagement with our existing community?
When do people actively support or share our work?
Avoid collecting data just because it’s available. Each question should link to a real decision you need to make.
We recommend downloading your content data every few months to help spot patterns, as well as doing an annual download. LinkedIn only retains data for the last 365 days – after that, it’s no longer available.
2. Separate reach from engagement
One common source of confusion is assuming all posts perform in the same way. Leaders also often focus heavily on vanity metrics or ask you to make a campaign ‘go viral’.
These are the top metrics that matter:
Impressions show how many times your content appears in feeds. They’re useful for understanding what content creates visibility and awareness, which help you grow your audiences.
Engagement looks at how people interact with your content through reactions, comments, clicks, saves and reposts. Engagement rates are usually calculated by comparing these interactions against impressions or follower numbers. Content that prompts engagement helps build connections with your audience.
You might see a post with 50 likes, a couple of comments and a handful of clicks and assume it’s done well. But if that’s from an audience of over 10,000 people, it’s telling you something very different from a post with 20 likes, six comments and multiple clicks from an account with just 1,000 followers.
In Gesher’s case, celebration posts and milestone moments consistently reach the widest audience, helping introduce the school to new people. Posts sharing teacher voices, lived experience and reflections on practice generate stronger engagement, strengthening relationships with existing followers.
Seeing these patterns makes it easier to plan content intentionally, rather than expecting every post to do everything.
3. Pay attention to reposts (they show values aligning)
Reposts are an often-overlooked signal. When someone reposts your content, they are choosing to associate it with their own profile and network.
For Gesher, reposts are most common on recruitment posts, partnership announcements and stories that clearly express the school’s values, demonstrating the community feels confident showing its support for the school and employees are happy to repost jobs.
While not strictly an analytics metric, engaging with posts from team members’ accounts or partner organisations is also an important part of growing your audience. These reposts don’t always result in large impressions or engagement, but help build stronger relationships and trust between those with shared values.
4. Look for patterns, not perfection
You don’t need long reports or detailed spreadsheets. From a downloaded Excel document, you can do a simple review every few months. Focus on impressions and engagement, asking:
Which content types consistently perform well?
What surprises you?
What confirms (or challenges) your assumptions?
Some posts may look like they’re underperforming at first glance, but the engagement rate – especially clicks – can be very high. LinkedIn is built to encourage connection, not just visibility.
At Gesher, our deliberate tagging of employees, partners and contributors, plus clear calls to action, has secured more profile visits, reposts and new followers.
5. Apply the insight
Light-touch analytics can help teams:
Prioritise content that builds trust, not just reach: This helps everyone in the organisation decide which ideas and stories are worth sharing.
Steadily grow the right audiences: Going viral can bring a spike in followers, but these often leave just as quickly. Focus on building and nurturing the audiences that matter to you.
Plan posts with clearer intent: This makes it easier to test new ideas, reuse or adapt content from other places, such as blogs, and experiment with posting days and times.
Most importantly, this light-touch approach helps teams spend time and budget where it has the greatest effect.
Final thoughts
LinkedIn analytics don’t need to be complex to be useful. For small comms teams, their value lies in helping you see patterns, reduce guesswork and plan more effectively.
Used well, analytics support better conversations about what content works for your organisation. They’re a tool to help teams focus their resources and they bring a sense of satisfaction as you measure the results from making small tweaks to your content.
Finally, analytics should guide not dictate your decision-making. Understanding your unique data is important to complement your professional judgement – you know your audiences and you know the nuances of your content.
At Agenda, we support organisations with everything from light-touch analytics reviews to deeper research, helping teams understand what’s working so they can use their time and resources to maximum effect.
