Most likely you are using LinkedIn and have a network of “connections” and “followers.” Connections are people whom you have invited into your network or who have invited you and you accepted. Although all connections are followers (unless, in the rare event, they chose the LinkedIn option to remain connected without following you), not all followers are connections. These followers are people who simply chose to follow you anonymously, presumably to read your articles or posts and keep up with your career, but for whatever reason chose not to be in your network of connections–perhaps former employees, colleagues, bosses, et al, who don’t want you to know that they are keeping track of you. I have more followers than connections.
If you are an active user on LinkedIn, chances are you sometimes read a post that you decide to “like” or “celebrate,” or maybe re-post with a short note, or occasionally comment on. If you are a particularly active user, you are probably writing original posts or articles as well.
LinkedIn regards posts as “updates,” for some reason. But more importantly LinkedIn shows you how many actual views your updates receive and how much engagement they attract–in the form of “likes” or comments.
You probably want to pay attention to these metrics in order to get a feel for the kind of posts or articles that your network appreciates–which would encourage you to write more of that particular type of post. You would think that if you get a lot of views, that would be encouragement to post more often. At the same time, if you get hardly any views, you might just give up altogether, thinking that no one really cares what you have to say or are thinking about.
But apparently there is some confusion over what actually constitutes a “view.” A “like” or comment is easy to understand, because when someone likes or makes a comment, they clearly have read the post and chose to engage with it. And that’s good to know.
Is your update counted as a view merely by being in someone’s feed? Does the number of views equate to the number of people who have seen or read your post? In other words, in order to get a view, does someone need to read your post, click on it, or what? You would think that there would be a clear answer to this question, but apparently there is not.
There was a post in my LinkedIn feed where the writer expressed confusion about the meaning of the “views” and “likes” on his various posts, so he asked LinkedIn to help him understand the relationship between the two and what he should do to improve his stats.
LinkedIn did actually respond to his query; but he didn’t get a clarifying answer. In short, he couldn’t figure out how to apply the answer to his posts to improve his results. LinkedIn wasn’t perfectly clear on how they are measuring views. At least that was the writer’s conclusion.
So I decided to see if I could figure anything out by using my last 10 posts and making a chart of the views and likes (for posts older than 12 months, LinkedIn does not retain the number of views).
In the chart accompanying this blog post, the “likes” are in blue on the x-axis and the “views” are in orange on the y-axis.
As you can see, there are only a few cases where the views are relatively high while the likes are low (left-side of the chart); but generally it seems that there is a correlation between the two—as one goes up, so does the other. And with a substantial number of views, the likes do increase significantly. Intuitively you would expect this to be the case, even though there are exceptions; the chart shows that there can be a small number of likes even with a significant number of views.
We would like to know the true relationship between the two because it might tell us something about how our networks value the content that we are posting. In the case of a high number of views and few or zero likes, you could conclude that that particular post or content did not appeal to your network. When I put this piece of content that you are reading now on LinkedIn, for example, it was not popular with my network. As of this writing, it has received no likes or engagement–but a fair number of views. Overall, it sits at the bottom rank of my posts in terms of total views and engagement.
I’m still not sure what a “view” is; but I know it’s not equivalent to engagement. In my case, If I look only at the number of views, I would conclude that my network responds well when I talk about my clients and the work I do with them. Posts about their mission and goals, the role I play, or the people who are part of those organizations are popular with my network and sometimes receive comments.
In terms of coming to any conclusion on views versus likes: We would all like to see our posts receive a high number of views; however, that may be ultimately determined by LinkedIn algorithms. At the end of the day, regardless of the number of views (if only a small number of people in our network see or read a particular post), we would like there to be high engagement in the form of likes and even comments. That would mean that our network is encouraging more of that particular kind of content, which is good data to have about the overall preferences of our networks.
