How to track LinkedIn growth month over month

Checking your numbers daily teaches you nothing and costs you an hour a week. A thirty-minute review once a month tells you what to keep doing, mostly because a month is long enough for the noise to cancel out and short enough that you still remember what you tried.

Record five numbers

• Posts published.
• Median impressions per post.
• Comments from people outside your network.
• New followers.
• Conversations that started on LinkedIn and turned into something.

Five is deliberate. A dashboard with twenty metrics does not get read, and every extra number increases the chance you find a pattern that is not there.

Compare against last month only

One month back is enough to see direction, and it keeps the causes fresh. Comparing against a year ago sounds rigorous but is usually useless, because your topics, your audience, and your available time have all changed, so nothing in the difference is attributable.

Name your top three and bottom three

Write one honest sentence about each. Not "this one did well," but why you think it did: it named a specific number, it disagreed with common advice, it was posted on a day you were free to reply. Your explanations will be wrong sometimes, and that is fine. Patterns show up after two or three months of writing them down, and they never show up if you only look at charts.

Change one thing

Topic, format, or frequency. One per month, so next month's review can actually attribute the difference. This is slower than it feels like it should be, and it is also the only way to end up with a set of things you know work for your audience rather than a collection of advice you read somewhere.