This year is going to be my «LinkedIn year». I have taken this decission during the first day of January and let’s try not to ask why, but I think that I was missusing this social network, I was having something like a feeling about I was losing something. So I should have a plan in order to increase not only my presence but also the impact of my Internet activity in some of the LinkedIn indicators. First of all, I needed to know what was my situation in LinkedIn so I asked for all my data to LinkedIn (you can do it navigating by the menu «Settings and privacy / Data Privacy / Get a copy of your data»). In just one day, I received an e-mail saying that my copy was available for download.
After analyzing the information available for a while, I decided to create this really simple dashboard with MS Power BI (the BI tool that we use in efectivarte.com) . The idea of the article is not to show how I built it, but how easy is to understand the reality with figures (moving from «I believe» to «I know»), how to fix an objective and how to implement some actions in order to see if we are achieving the expected results in the future. I’m gonna try to update this information quarterly so I could see how far from the target I am and if have to take some corrective action in the following months.
With the dashboard we can have some easy but interesting conclussions. I have now 2125 connections (my LinkedIn page says 2149 but when I downloaded data some of them have no name so I decided to lose them). Nice to see that the average of new contacts monthly since 2009 is 16, but since 2015 new users is above 200 by year. I would like to know why I only had 7 new contacts in October last year (first month I started paying for the premium version). A couple of ideas more: most of my connections are part of my present company and that’s the reason why I didn’t charted it; and, in the last six months I have received much more invitations that I sent.
The target is to increase the number of connections and let’s see if we can gain not only connections but any kind of professional collaborations. My plan to gain new connections is not about sending thousands of invitations, it could be easier but not elegant. I would like to gain connections by creating new content as publications or comments and trying to interact more with them by messages. So… these are the KPIs (OKRs if you want to use the «new» concepts) that I’m going to follow in the next months:
- Number of connections: this is going to be the target, and let’stalk about it a bit later.
- Number of publications: I will keep my blogsterapp.com robot publishing the previous articles of my productivity blog (sorry, in Spanish), the new ones and the articles that I write in efectivarte (more related with KPIs, Power BI, etc…).
- Number of reactions and comments: I’m gonna interact much more with the rest of the Community by commenting their articles, reacting to them etc…
- Weight of invitations sent of total invitations. This KPI will act as a limit. I’m going to try not to send more invitations than I receive, so this indicator shouldn’t be above 50%. Optimum if it’s not above 35% as this could mean that the content I’m publishing in LinkedIn seems to be interesting.
And now… what about the target? If you see the last chart, down and right, I asked powerBI to forecast the 2021 new connections KPI. This chart said that I should have 278 new connections by the end of 2021, but… If I really increase the regular activity in LinkedIn… what about 365 new connections? One per day? Much bigger than historical data, bigger than all history personal new connections in a year…
So… now, we have a target, an SMART target (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely). We have defined the levers, and we have several KPIs we can follow. Now we have a plan and let me say that it’s not much more difficult to do one for your small business. I invite you to follow this blog and we will see how the plan is evolving.
BTW, if you click in the dashboard in the LinkedIn logo you will see my profile, you can be one of my new connections of the year.
