Many B2B businesses are beginning to understand the incredible power of LinkedIn, especially in creating a customized Group. But how do you measure the effectiveness of your group, and learn how to improve over time?

In April, LinkedIn expanded the functionality of its group statistics (located under the “more” navigation, under “Group Statistics”), giving you comprehensive information and insight into your group, including members’ demographics, growth and interactions using charts, graphs and other visuals.

Let’s take a look at each part of the tool.

Summary

This tab provides an overview of your group’s statistics, including:

  • When the group was started
  • Total # of members
  • Number of Comment in the previous week
  • Where the majority of your group members are located geographically (as a percentage)
  • What field the majority of group members are found in (as a percentage)
  • The Management Level of your group members (as a bar graph)

Each of the subsequent tabs dive deeper into these high level statistics.

Demographics

Understanding your group members helps to target your messaging and discussion topics, as well show you where you have opportunities to expand your group population. With the demographics tab, and the four subnavigation pages within it, you can see the industry, seniority, function and location of your group members. Data is given as a bar graph on the corresponding subcategory table, but also given as percentages by majority on the other tabs for easy reference.

Growth

Seeing the patterns of membership over time, gives you greater perspective into your recruiting efforts and their results. The growth tab features:

  • Your Total # of members
  • Number of New Members from the previous week (as a percentage)
  • New members per week in a bar graph
  • Your week over week growth rate

With this information at hand, you can measure the results of various marketing activities to promote your group, and the effect they have on membership, as well as your active recruiting strategies and results.

Activity

Your activity tab lets you see how your members are engaging with your content. Statistics for this tab include:

  • # of comments in the previous week
  • # of new discussion in the previous week
  • # of new jobs and promotions posted in the previous week
  • A line graph representing your comments and discussion since you began your group.

Access to these numbers allows you to look deeply into which discussions prompt the most activity, and well as deciphering if there are cyclical trends in interaction based on time of year, subject matter, etc.

Previously, we discussed the reasons why engaging in a LinkedIn group and creating your own group can be valuable. Now, LinkedIn has given us the opportunity to review down to a micro level the effectiveness of our groups, allowing us to learn and improve from these statistics.

What valuable information have you gleaned from LinkedIn Group Analytics?