LinkedIn is undoubtedly the best social network for B2B marketing in the last few years, and it keeps growing. With over 80% of leads for B2B businesses coming from LinkedIn compared to 12% from Twitter and around 6% from Facebook – LinkedIn is a powerful social media tool that should not be ignored.

However, to take full advantage of all the opportunities LinkedIn can offer to your business, you need to regularly track your marketing and sales efforts, audit your brand and competitor’s online presence, and, most importantly – change with the flow. 

Nothing in the business world is static, and LinkedIn is no exception. So what can you do to keep your brand LinkedIn profile relevant and desirable? 

In this article, I’ll go through all the essential elements of your personal and brand professional profiles, how you can improve them, and all the LinkedIn analytics tools and metrics to help you along the way. 

Let’s dive in.

What is a LinkedIn Audit?

A LinkedIn audit is the process of thoroughly examining all aspects of your LinkedIn presence with the aim of improving it. To start a LinkedIn audit, you need to define your goals and KPIs. 

Depending on your goals, three main types of LinkedIn Audits need to be performed, including:

• A Brand audit on your personal LinkedIn profile may include your headline, profile photo, summary, experience, and skills.
• A Company LinkedIn Page audit that looks at things like the banner photo, “About us” section, and employee list. 
• A content audit that includes your posts, engagement rates, and overall brand influence. 

The main aim of auditing is to improve your LinkedIn presence to generate more leads and sales from LinkedIn.

Why Is a LinkedIn Audit Important?

Just like any social media, LinkedIn is an ever-changing platform. This means you have to be up-to-date with all the trends, popular types of content, and successful marketing and advertising tactics so you don’t fall behind your competition. 

Almost every company has a LinkedIn profile, but not all use it to its full potential. Instead, they rely on tactics like email marketing and their sales team to acquire the most important clients. And while these are all essential parts of any business’s success, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of a strong online presence. 

For example, even if you find a client through a cold call or an email, they will probably try to research you and the company before making the purchase decision. So naturally, they head to your professional LinkedIn profile or the company page to get a better idea of how you are as a business. 

Keeping your profiles up-to-date and optimized will guarantee that you can make the best first online impression to your clients, attract great talents and be an overall astounding representation of your company. 

How to Perform a Personal LinkedIn Profile Audit

The first step in performing a LinkedIn Profile audit is to gather all the information you need. This includes your headline, profile photo, summary, experience, and skills. Once you have all the information, you need to analyze it and see what can be improved.

This audit aims to make sure that your LinkedIn profile aligns with your company’s branding and marketing strategy. After all, your profile can reflect the image of the company.

Here are some tips on how to improve each of these sections:

LinkedIn Headline

Your LinkedIn headline is one of the most important information on LinkedIn because it’s the first thing people see. So, if it’s not catchy or interesting enough, you may want to change it. 

It’s been proven that headlines that are formed as sentences are a lot more successful. For example, don’t just write your position in the company – write what you give to your company as a professional. 

Ex. Director of Content Marketing 

Instead, try – Managing a team of creative storytellers 

Identify some niche keywords and create a unique headline that will impress your leads and potential partners. If you decide to put your actual job title so that people can easily recognize you, make sure to use terminology that is not hard to understand.

Let’s take a look at the headline of Nemanja Zivkovic. 

The first part of his headline is a statement that includes a niche keyword, and then he continues that statement in a way that separates him from other B2B marketers. The business is called Funky Marketing, and he incorporates that idea in the way he presents himself on LinkedIn. 

After that, we also have the actual job titles and some personal information that makes him even more relatable and human. 

Overall, from the profile photo and banner to the headline – this is a great example of a professional and approachable personal profile that is still strongly connected with the main brand and business ideology. 

Profile Photo

Your profile photo is the first thing people see on LinkedIn, so it’s important to make sure it represents you well. It’s important to look approachable, which means that stiff, passport-like photos are not recommended. 

Here is a quick checklist to see whether you have the best possible LinkedIn profile photo: 

• Use a recent photo – a few year-old at most; 
• Make sure it’s a high-resolution, professional photo;
• Choose a picture where your face takes up at least 60% of the entire area; 
• Be the only person in the photo, no group pictures; 
• Don’t use a selfie; 
• Choose a natural expression that reflects your personality; 
• Stand in front of a neutral background, nothing too distracting. 

Summary Section

The summary, also known as the “About Me” section, is where you have the opportunity to describe your professional skills, ambitions, background, and much more. It allows you to present yourself to your clients more naturally than just listing job experience, dates, and titles. 

People will always prefer to connect with other people, so make sure it sounds human and don’t be afraid to be creative. As a representative of your company, you need to be approachable, genuine, and trustworthy. Don’t write it in the third person and avoid cliche-filled phrases such as: “results-driven sales professional with a proven track record in thinking outside the box when encountering challenges.” 

There are many different ways to approach writing your summary, but the end goal should be something that truly reflects who you are as a person and a professional. If you find yourself stuck, try out Jasper.ai or other ai writing tools that can generate creative headlines and summary sections about you. 

Work and Voluntary Experience

The experience section in your LinkedIn profile should give clients, prospects, and potential partners a more in-depth idea of your job responsibilities and role in the company. 

Here is what you should include and avoid: 

• Write in the first person;
• Add a description to each one of your listed job experiences; 
• Have achievements and not just generic responsibilities that go with the occupation; 
• Emphasize how you add value to the company and your clients; 
• Add only the relevant parts of your career path; 
• Enrich the content with niche keywords; 
• When you list previous roles, make sure to add your biggest accomplishments there.

A regular LinkedIn audit aims to keep all of your info up-to-date, including your own experience in the current company. So if you were promoted or achieved something significant, don’t hesitate to add it to this section. 

Skills & Endorsements 

This is a great LinkedIn feature because it allows you to choose which skills you want to showcase, and you can even get endorsements from peers, clients, and colleagues. When you conduct a LinkedIn audit, you can check whether the most important skills are at the forefront or if there are any new skill tests that you might take. 

Another thing that you can do is politely ask colleagues and clients to endorse said skills so you can improve your professional LinkedIn profile. You can also add new ones as they increase the chances of clients finding you. 

How to Perform a Company LinkedIn Profile Audit

Now, let’s take a look at how to perform a LinkedIn company page audit. This audit aims to make sure that your LinkedIn page is in line with your branding and marketing strategy. 

When performing a company LinkedIn Page audit, you need to look at the following elements:

Company Banner Image, Profile Picture, and Headline

Let’s take a look at Grammarly. 

Their profile picture is their logo, which is the standard for company profiles across social media. You need to be recognizable to your user base, and putting your logo as a profile picture is the best way to do it. 

The banner they have used is of a simple design, but the phrase they have put contains their identity, goals, and achievements. This is a great way of constructing your company banner because it shows a unique message and the soul of your business in a single image. 

The last thing we see is the headline. There are several ways you can go about this. Grammarly placed their motto there, which can also be found on their website. 

However, in the next example, you can see that the app development company Appetiser used that space to tell their audience exactly what their product is and list a few of their big clients to showcase their achievements. 

Another great addition to the headline is that they have added a CTA at the end, which automatically makes them an approachable and friendly business that clients can easily turn to. 

About Section

Next, head over to your overview section and ask yourself: 

• Is the bio engaging and exciting? 
• Is there enough information about what the company does? 
• Does it inspire people to connect and learn more about our products and services? 

If the answer is no, then you need a change. 

In this part of your business profile, you have the chance to showcase how your company brings value to clients, employees, and the business world in general. Make sure it’s both engaging and informative to impress future clients and potential partners. 

Here is the about section of the company Canva. 

They pinpoint the exact problems Canva managed to solve by creating and launching their design tool from the very beginning. After that, you can see the raw data – their success in numbers. And finally, a concise description of all the major features and benefits users get by using Canva. 

From beginning to end, the reader is captivated, they want to learn more, and they are impressed by the company. Of course, you don’t have to follow this template and write the “About” section the same way, but you should strive to inspire the same feelings. 

LinkedIn for Business and Important Metrics to Track 

Once you have analyzed everything in your LinkedIn Business profile, you can proceed to the other part. Thisconsists of the content you post, your employees and their activity, your followers, and visitors. 

Thankfully, LinkedIn for Business provides companies with the statistics to do a thorough LinkedIn audit. Remember that you need to be an admin of the page to have access. 

There are five different types of LinkedIn page analytics:

1. Update analytics

They measure the effectiveness of your LinkedIn updates and how engaging your followers find them. They also help your social media team analyze patterns and trends that further aid your campaigns and presence. 

For example, you might notice that posts published on Monday have a lot more engagement than those on Tuesday, which will lead to a change in strategy. 

2. Follower analytics

These are the demographic statistics needed to see your followers’ location, job title, industry, and company. This information can help you create content that caters to the needs of your follower base, thus increasing it over time. 

3. Visitor analytics

These show the same information as the follower analytics but for people that are not yet your followers. It will allow you to research possible ways you can improve your content and how you interact with your audience to turn those visitors into loyal followers. 

4. Employee advocacy analytics

It’s been proven that companies with a list of active employees on LinkedIn usually have a much better online presence and reach than those that don’t. Your employees can easily become brand advocates, and employee advocacy analytics allow you to monitor that behavior. 

As LinkedIn themselves put it best, this feature will “provide page admins of a LinkedIn Page the opportunity to gauge trends in employee and member engagement with content recommended to employees on the My Company tab.”

5. Talent brand analytics 

This feature is best used by the recruiters in your company. It will help them find suitable talents that can join your business and cause. 

Using these analytics tools, you can decide whether you need to make changes to your company profile accordingly. Of course, you’ll want to pay attention to your cover and profile picture, your bio, and your content strategy: such as the type of posts you’re putting out or whether articles, explainer videos, or polls gain the most engagement.

Here are the most important metrics to follow:

• Reactions, comments, and shares to your posts and your employees’ posts; 
• Unique impressions;
• Clicks; 
• Engagement rates; 
• Follower and visitors metrics; 

Take your LinkedIn Brand Profile to the Next Level

Social media marketing can be a challenge even for experienced companies. You want to impress your clients, connect with your audience and attract talented job seekers. That’s not an easy venture, especially if you have only one profile that has to check all the boxes.

The best way to learn and become better is to purposefully look for mistakes and try to fix them. This applies to all social media channels, not just LinkedIn. Making your profile stand out, creating content that truly speaks to your audience, and setting an example of thought leadership are just a few things you can do.

Whatever your strategy is, just make sure it’s human and always ask yourself the question: “Would I trust this brand?”.

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