We may think of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube as the bigger players in the game. Still, LinkedIn’s no underdog either — it’s playing the long game and consistently growing its user base, with LinkedIn members actively engaging and driving the platform’s reach year-on-year.
For reference, just in the past year, LinkedIn surpassed 1.03 billion LinkedIn members (with almost 33 million users onboarding just in 2023) and acquired a 13.9% change as year-on-year growth for ad reach.
It also has a targeted user base of working professionals, with almost 33% of its audience being regularly active. This effectively puts LinkedIn as one of the top 20 sites on the internet. It also has more unique visitors than apps like Reddit, Baidu, Yandex, and Yahoo.
LinkedIn is a foolproof bet for attracting prospects and engaging with existing users.
On that note, if you’re looking at boosting your brand’s LinkedIn engagement rate (and are wondering how monitoring audience behavior will help you achieve this task), this post is for you.
Here, we uncover how to calculate your LinkedIn engagement rate, monitor audience behavior on the platform (and leverage it to grow your LinkedIn account), and some best practices to increase your engagement rate.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
How do you calculate your engagement rate on LinkedIn?
If you’re being systematic and formulaic with the approach, there are two ways to calculate your engagement rate on LinkedIn:
Option #1: Calculating Engagement Rate Per Post
Engagement Rate = Total Engagements (Likes + Comments + Shares + Clicks) × 100/ Total Impressions
Option #2: Calculating Engagement Rate by Followers
Engagement Rate = Total Engagements (Likes + Comments + Shares + Clicks) × 100/ Total Followers
What’s considered a “good” engagement rate will differ based on your industry and niche, the number of followers/reach you have, and the type of post you’ve produced.
However, according to most experts, anything between 1-2% is considered average engagement, a score between 2-5% is considered great engagement, and anything above the 5% mark is excellent.
Surprisingly, LinkedIn engagement does not equal LinkedIn reach (according to data from Richard Van Der Blom’s Algorithm Insights Report). That’s to say, how your audience engages with your posts only accounts for 20% of the reason your post is shown to other users.
The remaining 80% of it depends on other factors (or performance drivers), like:
- The language in which your content is posted (English is given priority over other languages)
- How active you are when your post is shared
- Your account’s size and activity levels
- Relevancy of the topic (to the reader)
- The quality and type of content
How can keeping a pulse on audience behavior help you increase your LinkedIn engagement?
How your audience interacts and reacts to your LinkedIn posts helps you understand what resonates with them. Sure, the algorithm plays a big part in getting the post to them, but once it’s there, it’s only up to them to decide if they like the topic or resonate with your words.
Monitoring audience behaviors and adjusting their LinkedIn content marketing strategy have worked well for many brands. For example, when we surveyed for responses, here’s what our SMEs (subject matter experts) told us:
“We saw a trend where our users were highly interested in ‘behind the scenes’ content. This led us to create a LinkedIn series showcasing our company’s operations. This strategy helped us increase engagement by over 35%.”
“We noticed our audience engaged most with industry analysis posts. We developed a system to track trending topics in security and technology, then created weekly insight pieces. This strategic shift got us a 26% higher engagement.”
“We recently created a campaign centered around our e-book, ‘Tis the season to scale, aimed at key decision-makers at e-commerce brands gearing up for the holiday season. By analyzing audience behavior, we noticed our target ICP engaged most with content offering practical insights on high-stakes, seasonal campaigns—particularly in a format that justified our surveys and crunched the relevant data into graphs.
Leveraging this, we adjusted our posting strategy to promote snippets from our own content in carousel posts, aligning with peak engagement times. Each post about the ebook highlights strategies for Black Friday & Cyber Monday, ad strategy tips, and 2024 holiday shopping trends. The result? A 30% increase in engagement and a significant rise in e-book downloads, enhancing both brand visibility and inbound leads.”
Monitoring audience behavior on LinkedIn is a game-changer for boosting brand engagement on your LinkedIn page. It lets companies identify what resonates most and refine their content.
Another case study that exemplifies this statement?
SoFi, a modern finance company, often posts about partnerships and options for funding an online business, individuals, and entrepreneurs.
By analyzing engagement on these posts and tracking reactions, comments, and shares – SoFi gains insight into audience interests and adjusts future content to highlight popular themes.
This approach allows SoFi to engage directly with LinkedIn users, increasing visibility and building a stronger connection with their LinkedIn community, all while reinforcing their role in accessible financing.
Pro Tip: Digital analytics tools allow brands to track key metrics such as post reach, engagement rates, and audience demographics, helping them determine which relevant hashtags and content types resonate most with their target audience
This data-driven approach enables marketers to tailor their messaging and posting times, ensuring they deliver relevant, valuable content that drives interaction.
How to monitor audience behavior on LinkedIn
A quick and easy way to monitor audience engagement is to stay in tune with the insights shared by LinkedIn Analytics (you can rely on this tool to share data like visitor metrics, follower metrics, content performance metrics, competitor metrics, and demographic metrics).
For reference, Tomasz at Sentinel also uses LinkedIn Analytics to find out which posts resonated with their audience and which were the best times to post (for them, it was 7-9 a.m. EST).
Another thing you can do is run polls and surveys on LinkedIn to directly ask your audience what they’d like to read and which content formats they’d prefer interacting with. For reference, here’s an example of a brand using a poll to ask their followers what type of content they’d like to see from them:
Aside from these two options, you have a third to consider: Leveraging digital analytics tools (we previously mentioned this). In this arena, brands like Social Sprout, Hootsuite, and SocialPilot are known for their standout features.
It’s also important to consider that what your audience says it wants vs. what it truly wants are two very different things.
That’s to say, while you could run audience polls/surveys and monitor their behavior on existing posts, you’re still only gathering their opinions on topics you already cover, not the topics you could cover. Perhaps those are the topics the audience wants to read and invest in.
To combat this, we recommend leveraging social media listening tools like Mention to keep track of organic audience conversations and provide insights about topics, competitors, or concerns your audience mentions.
Other best practices to increase your engagement rates
Aside from keeping a pulse on audience behavior, here are some other best practices that’ll help you increase your engagement rate on LinkedIn.
1. Create targeted and optimized content
Content optimization, which means creating content tailored to your audience’s preferences, is a solid strategy for boosting your brand on LinkedIn.
Take Nlyte as an example. They offer data center management solutions, so it makes sense for them to create content around energy consumption and efficiency, targeting the specific interests of LinkedIn users in their industry. It helps them make genuine connections with their customers.
2. Use data management tools to gather insights
For marketers who aren’t tech-savvy, accessing actionable LinkedIn insights doesn’t have to be complicated. Bright Data, an industry-leading data collection company, offers a variety of fresh, ready-to-use LinkedIn datasets in their marketplace.
These prebuilt datasets simplify the process, allowing you to quickly tap into valuable audience engagement trends without needing technical expertise. Combine these datasets with tools like Mention to uncover key audience trends, refine your strategies, and enhance your LinkedIn engagement.
This insight empowers you to make data-driven decisions, from refining your posting schedule to tailoring content that captures attention. With this tool, you can monitor shifts in audience behavior in real time, helping you stay agile and responsive to your audience’s interests and needs.
3. Give back and engage with your community
Another way to increase your engagement levels is just by being active in your community and giving back to the creators/accounts who have been in your corner — for reference, you can consider:
- Sharing posts with real value to help others (e.g., company insights or resources everyone can benefit from)
- Replying to thoughtful comments (especially on big creator accounts to get noticed)
- Recognizing industry newcomers and their achievements
- Tagging others in relevant posts or job opportunities
- Acknowledging mentors and inspirations
- Creating AMA (Ask Me Anything) posts
- Promoting your peers in a genuine way
- Partaking/celebrating in virtual events
- Engaging in groups
Pro Tip: Some experts also recommend joining targeted engagement pods and groups with people who are already a part of your community or industry (or potentially could be). Richard Van Der Blom also shared advice on becoming strategic with tagging.
This is mainly because posts with no tags perform 10% poorly, whereas posts that tag four profiles see a 48% increase in reach. He also recommends not to exceed this limit and to tag individuals in images from events you have recently been to.
4. Keep up with algorithm updates
We previously discussed how your LinkedIn engagement is not directly correlated to your reach, and you need to consider other performance drivers and algorithmic factors to reach larger audiences and gather more engagement with your posts.
For this, you’ll need to keep up with algorithm updates on LinkedIn as they occur annually (if not quarterly). For reference, you can expect Showcase Pages, outbound links in your posts, chain letters, and hashtags to see significantly less engagement today than in 2023.
On the flip side, however, you can expect video content, LinkedIn lives, GIFs, text + image posts, etc., to perform well. Experts have also suggested keeping a pulse on timing for the best visibility, and according to Richard Van Der Blom’s report on the LinkedIn algorithm, these are the timings that work best for the following content formats:
Achieving good engagement levels also helps to have topical authority, meaningful connections, and content clarity, , alongside leveraging employee advocacy to expand your reach and influence. LinkedIn promotes original, high-quality content with real value from experts before anything else.
5. Stick with a consistent cadence
Posting consistently on LinkedIn is more than a tactical boost for engagement — it’s a strategic way to stay visible, ensure your LinkedIn profile remains active, and continually refine your approach. Here’s why sticking to a cadence matters:
- LinkedIn prefers it that way and boosts posts more from accounts that are regularly active.
- Over time, you’ll develop a gut feeling of what your audience wants and what kind of content resonates to see how they prefer to consume content.
- It increases brand recall and helps you build a stronger identity. Your followers trust and expect posts from you more regularly (or at least on a consistent schedule).
- It also helps you get noticed by brands, sponsors, and recruiters, increasing your likelihood of partnerships (if you’re a content creator) and job opportunities (if you’re a professional).
We recommend testing the cadence and sticking to a sustainable schedule that works well for you and your audience.
Wrapping up
In this piece, we discussed why LinkedIn is an ideal platform for brand engagement, how to calculate your engagement on LinkedIn, how monitoring your audience behavior can help you increase your engagement levels, and other best practices.
However, there’s still one thing we didn’t touch upon (or rather, only lightly touched upon). Your engagement levels are tied down to what your audience wants to interact with, not forced to interact with.
There’s only one real way to know what your audience wants to interact with. You must track their organic conversations (with the help of social listening tools) and refine your strategy based on that information.
At this juncture, Mention can help you keep track of your audience’s conversations on LinkedIn and other platforms like Instagram, Twitter (now X), G2, Facebook, Pinterest, and more!
These insights can not only help you improve your content strategy but also conduct market research, manage crises, guide competitive analysis, and more.
To see Mention in action and find out how it can become a go-to tool for your organization, opt for a free trial!
