LinkedIn Rolls Out Comment Impression Counts

LinkedIn is adding another way to measure the impact of your contributions in the app, with some users now able to see impression counts on their comments beneath LinkedIn posts.

As you can see in this example, LinkedIn’s in the process of rolling out comment impressions, which will provide more insight into how many people you’re reaching with your activity in the app.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“You can now see how many impressions your comments have received to gain insights on the impact within your LinkedIn community. A comment impression is counted each time someone views your comment. This count is non-unique, if the same member views a comment twice, it is counted as two comment impressions. Your own views are also counted towards the impression count.”

Which seems a little odd, in that you can just juice the numbers by re-viewing your own comment data. But then again, it’s only visible to you anyway, so you’d only be lying to yourself.

Though at the same time, influencers could use these as screenshots to highlight their reach in the app, which means that this could be used to game the system. As such, I’m not really sure why LinkedIn wouldn’t de-duplicate this data point, but that’s the approach that it’s chosen to go with, using a basic binary count of total views.

As noted by social media analyst Lindsey Gamble, one of the benefits of this approach is that it could provide more motivation for creators to leave more comments, which are a key part in driving growth in the app. Indeed, LinkedIn has previously noted that commenting can significantly increase your profile views, and therefore, having more insight into this element could play a part in boosting that activity.

LinkedIn further notes that company page admins will see the impression count of all comments made as the page, though comment impressions will not be shown in any dashboard, only on the individual comment.

And LinkedIn’s also bracing creators for potential swings in its comment impression counts:

“A wide range of factors can affect distribution and reach of your comments, due to which you may see varied engagement levels over time.”

So consistency of reach performance could be tricky, but that might also drive more comments, because users will know how many people they’re reaching with each. And if one fails to boost their exposure, they might comment more that week.

Potentially valuable, if slightly flawed. Either way, it’s another means to measure your LinkedIn impact, and weigh up your overall activity in the app.