My year on social media: LinkedIn

I like many things about LinkedIn, but I do not like its content feed. The content is generally great – for professional reading, it’s the best source for me – but organising it as you want, let alone tracking your own impact, is fiendishly difficult. This consequently deters me from posting on LinkedIn as much as I otherwise might; I don’t have useful metrics for how effective I am being, let alone how I might be more so.

The only consistent measures are likes and comments, and this video on the triggering of Article 50 filmed at work got 40 likes; nothing else I posted got more than 10.

This post, also work-related, celebrating us getting an award for our campaign to fund the eradication of polio, got 7 comments (all “congratulations”). I am also told that this got “8,471 views in the feed”. I don’t know what that means, and only posts from the last few weeks seem to have that metric displayed.

I wrote one new article for LinkedIn this year (as opposed to “posts” – a distinction whose difference is not clear), about the then imminent Northern Ireland Assembly election, and it got 111 “clicks”; also 11 likes and 3 comments. I have no other information on “clicks” so I can’t judge how successful it was. 3 comments may not seem like much, but it’s almost a tsunami by LinkedIn standards, and also one of them was from a former Taoiseach.

As I say, I like LinkedIn for may purposes, but it has some way to go to become an effective information sharing platform.