What are LinkedIn Impressions, and Why are They Important?

Whether you’re trying to attract job applicants, increase brand awareness, or boost sales, LinkedIn is an important place to start. After all, it’s the most professionally-focused social media platform, and nearly everyone is looking for information relevant to their industry.

With so many people vying for the attention of fellow professionals, how can you and your brand stand out? The answer to this question is by getting the right quantity of quality LinkedIn impressions.

What is an impression on LinkedIn, though? In short, impressions are a measure of success in the world of social media.

Definition of LinkedIn Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed on a given forum. The number includes posts, articles, videos, ads, and other content types. Similarly, you can get impressions for sponsored content so long as it includes your branded information. I’d argue that the possibilities for making impressions is endless.

Besides the flexibility of what content can create an impression, frequency is important. Our answer to the question, “What is an impression on LinkedIn?” includes the total number of views, not unique views. In other words, If I see an ad for American Express or influencer pictures of Mt. Fuji sponsored by an airline, they both count. Likewise, every time I see those ads on LinkedIn, it counts as a separate impression.

How LinkedIn Counts Impressions

LinkedIn tracks impressions automatically whether you post organic content or buy ad space. An impression is logged each time content appears in a user’s feed or search results, and you can find the information in your analytics screen.

Impressions are counted even if the user doesn’t click on or engage with the content. For this reason, an impression may not be effective for you to pay for it – or get credit for distributing the content. Similarly, repeat views by the same user are counted as separate impressions.

Ultimately, the simplest way to answer “What is an impression on LinkedIn?” is, “an instance where someone sees a piece of content.

Impressions vs Other LinkedIn Metrics

Of course, for advertisers and recruiters alike, Impressions isn’t the only show in town. If impressions express quantity, others indicate the quality or results of content views.

The first important distinction is between Impressions and Reach. While impressions count every view, the Reach only counts each viewer once per piece of content. So, if I look at a tour company’s travel article five times, I’d give five impressions but increase the Reach by one.

Similarly, engagement measures the extent to which people interact with your content. Those interactions could include comments, likes, and shares. If your content contains links, then clicking through would count as engagement. Generally speaking, the quantity of engagement is an indicator of content quality.

In a nutshell, impressions indicate potential visibility, while engagement shows active interaction. Because interaction is more likely to turn admirers into customers later, effective campaigns have higher engagement rates. This is true even if you’re trying to boost brand awareness, especially since engagement expands your reach.

Why LinkedIn Impressions Matter

Now that you understand what is an impression on LinkedIn, it’s important to understand why they matter. Ultimately, impressions are a critical metric for anyone who’s doing marketing on LinkedIn or any other social media network. There are several ways in which impressions help you be successful.

Measuring Brand Awareness

A high impression count means your content is being widely displayed. Even with paid advertising, more impressions mean that your content is appearing frequently in user feeds and homepages. Remember, ads get shown based on customer interests and relevant keywords. For organic content, wide distribution can mean your content is being shared.

Ultimately, a high number of impressions helps gauge overall brand visibility on the platform. From there, you can determine what areas need improvement to boost your brand’s success.

Evaluating Content Resonance

Over time, you’ll see that some content gets more impressions than other offerings. Compare impressions to engagement to see if people react to your content versus just scrolling through it. Generally, low engagement compared to impressions may mean your content isn’t compelling enough to share.

With this information, you can tweak your content strategy to improve your engagement rate. Double down on what works well, and improve it if you can. Likewise, change or discontinue approaches that don’t get much engagement. These approaches will help you improve performance and ROI over time.

Informing Ad Spend and Sponsored Content

Impressions are a key metric for paid content like Sponsored Posts because higher impressions mean more ad visibility. In addition, you’ll often pay for ads based on the number of impressions. For a successful campaign, you want a high level of visibility in the chosen niche.

Use impression data to optimize ad targeting and budget allocation. You might find that not enough people see the ad and that this is undermining your effectiveness. To fix insufficient distribution, you might alter the targeting to include a wider audience. Likewise, you’ll need to spend more money on ads as impressions rise.

Want an extra boost? Consider sponsoring content. While this practice is less widespread on LinkedIn, blog posts and similar content can be very effective. No matter what you choose, the chance to get organic impressions is invaluable, both for your wallet and public awareness.

Factors Affecting LinkedIn Impressions

One aspect of what is an impression on LinkedIn is considering how they can be earned. The days of posting something and simply hoping it goes viral are over, and nowadays, you’ll need to consider multiple factors.

Audience Size and Engagement

A larger audience (connections + followers) generally means more impressions. Mathematically speaking, if you have more people who are likely to see your content, circulation automatically increases. And if your audience is very engaged, the effectiveness of that audience is increased – if people engage with your content, their followers will see the reaction.

To boost your engagement rate, focus on growing a relevant, active audience. People who aren’t engaged or only passively interested in your industry are less likely to share content and increase your LinkedIn impressions.

Content Type and Format

Different content formats have varying impression potential, regardless of the social media platform. For instance, native videos tend to get high impressions due to autoplay, even on LinkedIn. And because video is less common on LinkedIn, you can provide a convenient learning experience without so much competition.

Eye-catching visuals and compelling titles can boost impressions, too. Especially because LinkedIn is more text-based than many other options, quality photos, and graphics can quickly grab attention. Often, these high-quality posts get high engagement rates.

Posting Time and Frequency

Posting when your audience is most active can increase impressions. Most people see the most recent posts in their feed before others, no matter what time of day they log on. However, as a rule, certain groups are online at similar times.

Experiment with different posting times and track results after each item is posted. While many LinkedIn users will check their profiles during business hours as part of their job, there are exceptions. For instance, someone who’s casually looking for a new opportunity while employed may keep it off the clock. Plus, there are time zone differences.

Once you’ve figured out when most of your potential audience is online, schedule most of your content for those times. It’s relatively easy to do this with social media schedulers. Decide on a posting frequency, such as once a day or twice a week. Then, maintain a consistent posting schedule to maximize impressions over time.

Further Reading: When is the Best Time to Post on LinkedIn in 2024?

LinkedIn Algorithm and Feed Ranking

Creating the best content to answer what is an impression on LinkedIn is just the beginning. Relevance is key to boosting your numbers. In particular, the LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes relevant, engaging content in user feeds. Choosing the right keywords to compete over is just the beginning, however. Instead, you need engagement.

Generally, posts from engaged connections are more likely to appear. In other words, if someone already loves your content, they’re more likely to share it with others. Remember to encourage interaction and maintain an active presence to improve feed ranking. Although useful techniques are a bit different than other networks, encouraging comments is a great place to start.

Strategies to Boost LinkedIn Impressions

Clearly, impressions on LinkedIn are critical to advertising success. Yet, it’s easy to be worried about how to increase this traffic. Fortunately, the rules for LinkedIn impressions are similar to those for other platforms, except that they are focused on business and privacy. Here are some of my best tips for maximizing your impressions.

Optimize Your Profile and Company Page

Ultimately, the most important aspect of getting your organic content discovered is being easy to find. As an individual and business leader, your complete and professional profile builds credibility and attracts views. You should always include your current business in your profile to drive views from one to the other.

Use relevant keywords in the headline, summary, and experience sections to appear in searches. Find keywords in the same way you’d locate them for other social networks, selecting the best ones for a business network. Your summary should indicate your goals and a clear view of your accomplishments so far.

Besides attracting visitors to your pages, engage with others’ content to increase your visibility and impressions. Engagement, whether it’s your content or someone else’s, exposes various pages and profiles to new LinkedIn users, expanding the audience over time.

Further Reading: How to Create a Killer Company Page on LinkedIn in 12 Easy Steps

Create Compelling, Valuable Content

Once people start visiting your pages and content, you want them to stay and engage. Among the ways to do this is to share insights, tips, and stories that resonate with your target audience. Present these well enough, and people will be more likely to share.

Also, don’t be boring: Use eye-catching visuals, videos, or infographics to stand out in the feed. For your brand page, be sure to use appropriate branding to reinforce your messages. Your brand is something that should stand out, rather than being an afterthought that disappears into the background.

Don’t forget to encourage engagement with questions, polls, and CTA’s. Each of these techniques is easily adapted to business communications. In fact, I’d argue that they are natural fits for B2B marketing, and not just adaptable to it.

Leverage LinkedIn Features and Formats

Among the better features of LinkedIn is the opportunity for detailed communications and the exchange of ideas. Publish long-form articles to showcase expertise and thought leadership, either for yourself or your brand. This technique encourages people to engage, and keeps you top-of-mind when it’s time to act.

Similarly, use LinkedIn Live for real-time video content and increased impressions. People love the ability to join in a conversation, whether it’s branded or not. At the same time, they’ll get to know you as a person. And as the saying goes, people pay people.

Finally, create shareable documents, presentations, and PDFs using LinkedIn’s built-in tools. These are easy to use and don’t cost anything, so you’re free to experiment. As a bonus, these pieces of content are often popular because they offer free information.

Further Reading: These are the Best 11 LinkedIn Premium Features You Should Check Out

Engage with Your Network Consistently

Content engagement shouldn’t be a one way street. Instead, like, comment, and share others’ relevant content to build relationships. You’ll help the other person, and also benefit from cross-exposure to each other’s audience.

You can also join and participate in LinkedIn Groups related to your industry. While this doesn’t necessarily give you instant impressions on LinkedIn, it does create interest in your content and expertise. Over time, people will check in with your profile, boosting impressions.

Finally, @Mention connections in your posts to encourage interaction and expand reach. While people don’t always answer when mentioned, you’ll invite them into the conversation around your content.

Promote Your LinkedIn Content on Other Channels

Despite LinkedIn’s unique posture as a business-focused social network, you can often bring your audience to LinkedIn from other sources. An easy way to do this is share LinkedIn posts on Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, and other media.

Another option is to embed LinkedIn posts on your website or blog, where your content can attract mainstream search engine traffic. As with social media cross-posting, this practice will increase traffic to your LinkedIn page.

Finally, encourage employees, colleagues, and friends to engage with your content. As people engage, it’ll increase your credibility online and let others see what you’ve accomplished.

Analyzing and Applying LinkedIn Impression Insights

Understanding what is an impression on LinkedIn, and learning to earn them, is just the beginning. Growing your audience and influence on LinkedIn is an ongoing process that requires tweaks over time. Adjusting your approach and maximizing results is dependent on applying insights from your analytics. Here’s how.

Accessing Impression Data on LinkedIn

Your first step is to determine how many impressions you’re getting. View impressions count on individual posts on your homepage feed, which displays the number of views. Then, check the Analytics tab for aggregate impression data over time. You’ll be able to see which posts are more effective than the others and double down on what works well.

If you run one, check LinkedIn Company Page analytics for detailed metrics. Here, you can find out the demographics and other information about your impressions. You can leverage this information for better targeting and ad planning, in addition to boosting impressions.

Identifying Top Performing Content

Next, prepare to maximize your effectiveness for impressions and engagement. Sort posts by impressions to see which topics and formats resonate with your audience. Look for common themes and styles among high-impression content. Does your audience love humor? Or does a straightforward approach with a whitepaper work better?

Incorporate successful elements into future content planning. Doing this will boost your success rate, regardless of the goal for each campaign or piece of content. In turn, your ROI will improve, too.

Further Reading: 11 Best Practices on How to Publish an Article on LinkedIn and Best Promote It

Tracking Impression Trends Over Time

Just like your original attempts at earning impressions, your initial adjustments can benefit from improvements. Monitor impression growth as you implement new strategies, then compare impression data month-over-month, year-over-year. Turn the raw data into charts and graphs for easier viewing and explanation.

Armed with detailed information, it’s easier to evaluate the effectiveness of content pivots, campaign launches, and other strategic changes. In turn, you’ll get the information needed to improve what works and change what doesn’t.

Refining Your LinkedIn Strategy

Getting the results of your efforts lets you pivot and refine your strategy. Generally speaking, you should double down on content types and topics driving the most impressions. As they say, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

Likewise, you should experiment with new tactics to address lagging impression counts. The lower counts often occur in a particular part of your profile or affect certain content types. In turn, you can look for the reasons why certain content underperforms and try to fix this. Sometimes, you’ll need to discontinue something completely.

Finally, continuously adapt to platform changes and audience preferences. You may find that, over time, formerly successful content types or approaches no longer work well. Similarly, there might be a trend you can capitalize on. Either way, keep track of these trends and respond accordingly.

Further Reading: 15 LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Tips to Grow Your Business on LinkedIn

Next Steps

In a nutshell, the answer to the question, “What is an impression on LinkedIn?” is “An instance where someone views your content.” However, there’s a lot more to this question than a simple definition. Impressions are also opportunities to share ideas with your audience and attract business. And like other opportunities, you can maximize them through careful planning.

Try these strategies today and see how well they work for you. There are also other posts on my blog to guide you more generally. Good luck!

Hero Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash