Competitor Analysis Benchmarking on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the most centralized sources of businesses and their employees on the web. It is a great space to promote your brand and conduct an insightful social media competitor audit and keep an eye on the competition and market trends. It helps you set the right KPIs and organize your benchmarks inside a free template. Here is an article that dives deep into competitor analysis on LinkedIn.

For the last couple of months, we’ve been covering competitor analysis on various social media platforms, so make sure to check out other articles in this series for helpful tips and tutorials:

• How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis on Facebook
• A Step by Step Guide on Using Facebook Insights for Competitor Analysis
• How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis Benchmarking on Twitter [+Template]
• Top 5 Social Media Competitor Analysis Tools

Before we get into the details, a quick reminder: if you use your LinkedIn account to study your competitors, the chances are high they will know about it in case you click on employee accounts. So to avoid this, either use LinkedIn Premium or just do your research in incognito mode. 

The benefits of benchmarking on LinkedIn

Learn from competitors success stories and failures	Content can tell a lot about your competitor’s approach to LinkedIn marketing and whether that approach works or not. Make sure to examine what type of social media content your competitor shares and what kind of engagement they get.
A better understanding of your industries’ and market segments’ needs	You can use the likes and comments to study the demographic that interacts the most with your competitors. LinkedIn competitor analysis can help bring up helpful patterns that you can implement in your targeting.
Set accurate KPI benchmarks	By studying your competitor’s LinkedIn key performance indicators (KPI) like the number of their followers and their engagement rate, you can compare your performance to see any opportunities for improvement.
Monitor market trends and discover new opportunities	Last but not least, competitor analysis helps you keep in the loop with the latest market trends, whether it’s seasonal offerings, hashtags, or social media challenges.

How to run Linkedin competitor analysis? 

1. Understand what questions you aim to answer

What is the purpose of your research? Are you planning to collect as much data as possible and draw conclusions once you see the whole picture? 

In the majority of cases, social media teams run the competitor analysis to answer the following questions:

• What is the industry standard for LinkedIn followers growth rate? 
• What is the engagement rate we should expect and aim for? 
• What content strategies does your target audience interacts with the most? 
• What type of content are they posting? 
• When are their followers active? 
• Is their posting consistent? 
• Do they run better advertising campaigns? 

2. Start by gathering social media data.

Gathering social media data is the first preparational step before you begin your research. You can either do it manually or use the in-built tool. 

Followers: The number of followers shows you the popularity of a specific competitor on LinkedIn. This KPI can help you see how your brand’s performance compares with the competition. If the average number is higher than yours, it can help you understand what number you should strive for with your LinkedIn marketing efforts. If the average number of followers is lower, it can show you how much ahead you are from the competition and which one is catching up the fastest. 

Reactions and comments for engagement rate: To help you understand the fraction of followers that interact with your competitor’s posts, you need to calculate the engagement rate. To do so, we suggest you take the 5 most recent posts of one of your competitors and use this formula to get the engagement rate for those posts. 

Engagement Rate=(Reactions + Comments) / Followers * 100

For example, this Hays’ post Engagement rate = {(201+21)/4998794}*100 = 0.0044%. 

Free LinkedIn Benchmarking Template

Before starting the analysis, prepare the document where you will gather all the information. To help you save time, we created a Free LinkedIn Benchmarking Template. The Google Sheet file has all the necessary columns for the competitor analysis. You can copy it and adjust it to your needs.

LinkedIn competitors’ content analysis 

Now that you covered the basics, it’s time to dive into the marketing side of things. The first part is the results, and the second part is the approach that brought those results, so we suggest you first analyze competitors on LinkedIn who have favorable results.

1. Content

First and foremost, start with content, study your competitor’s LinkedIn posts. Take a look at the tone of voice of those posts and the frequency. Look for media content. Do they share videos, images, slides, and infographics? If yes, then how often?

2. Reactions (on Posts)

LinkedIn recently followed Facebook’s lead and added 5 more ways you can react to posts. Take into account the total number of reactions the posts receive. Make sure also to filter out the number of so-called “inside” reactions. These are the likes and comments received from the employees of your competitor. This aspect will help you understand the quality of engagement the brand gets on their posts.  

3. Responses

Take the time also to study the comments people leave under the posts. Are they primarily positive or negative? How do people interact with the brand on LinkedIn? 

4. Demographics

Since there are no tools available for analyzing LinkedIn demographics, you pretty much have to study on your own. To do so, just scroll through the likes and comments and look for patterns. What type of people interacts with the brand the most? Where do they work? What titles do they have?

5. Content strategy evolution

Go back to the beginnings of the company page and see how their page evolved over the years. Analyze their previous approaches and see how they compare to the current approach. Is it more or less effective? Any content mistakes that you can learn and avoid? 

6. Community hashtags followers 

Gather the number of branded or community hashtags followers. This number provides insights into the competitors’ brand health and the strength of its community. 

7. LinkedIn ads performance

In the Ads section, you can study your competitor’s LinkedIn paid campaigns. These can help you set the tone for your campaigns and understand their targeting better. 

LinkedIn inbuilt competitor analysis tool

LinkedIn has launched a new competitor analysis tool to simplify social media marketers’ daily lives. Although, currently, it shows only two graphs: Followers and Organic content metrics (number of posts and engagement rate). 

Here is a quick guide on how to access it. 

Note: You’ll need admin access to your company page. 

Step 1: Go to Analytics. 

Step 2: Click on Competitors.

Step 3: LinkedIn shows a suggested list of competitors that you can modify. You can add up to 10 LinkedIn pages. 

After you click “Continue,” you’ll see two graphs with competitors’ metrics. 

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Analyzing your competitors and their activities on LinkedIn will help you set more realistic and accurate goals for your social media marketing plans. Make sure to conduct competitor analysis on LinkedIn periodically to always stay updated.