Shield LinkedIn glossary

Navigate essential LinkedIn analytics terms for personal branding and corporate influence, with straightforward insights and examples to support your LinkedIn growth.

Activity

Activity on LinkedIn includes all actions taken on the platform, such as posting, commenting, and engaging with content from other people, other creators. High activity can improve visibility and connections, building a more engaged network. For creators and brands, consistent activity is crucial for building connections and influence. With Shield you can track your posting activity, also called post frequency, to stay consistent on the LinkedIn platform.

Activity

Analytics

LinkedIn analytics are the data and insights collected from your LinkedIn profile and posts, helping you track performance and understand what resonates with your audience. Key metrics like impressions, engagement, and follower growth can inform your content strategy and improve reach. For professionals seeking to maximize LinkedIn, understanding analytics is key. Shield brings all your LinkedIn analytics into one dashboard, giving you a comprehensive view of profile and post performance. In depth, and at a glance.

Analytics

Audience

Your audience on LinkedIn consists of the people who view, engage with, and are influenced by your content and profile. This includes your connections, followers, and anyone else who interacts with your posts. Understanding your audience’s interests and needs is essential for creating relevant content that resonates, drives engagement, and supports your personal or professional goals. To grow a LinkedIn presence within your market, knowing your audience is essential. On Shield you get to understand your audience better with audience demographics, revealing location, occupation and more from the people who view your content.

Audience

Authenticity

Authenticity on LinkedIn is the practice of presenting yourself genuinely, sharing real insights, experiences, and values that reflect who you are professionally. Being authentic helps build trust with your audience, making connections more meaningful and interactions more impactful. Authenticity fosters stronger relationships and can enhance your credibility and influence on the platform. Shield tracks engagement across all your content. This way you get to learn which posts resonate with your target audience, and you will understand much better which role authenticity plays in your content strategy.

Authenticity

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of comparing your performance metrics against industry standards, competitors, or yourself from a previous period. Benchmarking LinkedIn data provides insights into how well your LinkedIn presence stacks up, helping you set realistic goals and measure success over time. Shield is helpful when it comes to benchmarking versus your past self from a previous period. For example this month vs last month, this quarter vs last quarter, or last year vs the year before that. Shield provides you all the information you need to learn if you’re moving in the right direction.

Benchmarking

Brand

A brand on LinkedIn represents the unique identity, values, and expertise that set a person or organization apart from others. It’s shaped by how you communicate, the content you share, and the relationships you build on the platform. A strong brand helps you stand out, builds trust, and creates lasting impressions with your network, supporting both personal and professional growth. Shield helps you stay on top of your organic, personal branding activities, by providing you key LinkedIn metrics across your content and activity. And both content and activity on LinkedIn play a pivotal role in shaping your personal brand in the minds of your audience.

Brand

Brand Ambassador

A brand ambassador is an individual who promotes a company’s brand on social media, often sharing company content and engaging with their target market and followers. On LinkedIn, employees acting as brand ambassadors can enhance company visibility and reputation through organic connections via their own personal profiles. Staying on top of the organic activities of your brand ambassadors is easy with Shield’s employee advocacy software. When you run a brand ambassador program, employee advocacy program, or otherwise, Shield brings all your brand ambassadors into one dashboard for you to stay on top of key metrics and performance. Forget all about manual data collection, Shield does the heavy lifting for you. Measuring the impact across personal LinkedIn profiles has never been easier.

Brand Ambassador

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness means how familiar people are with your brand, based on factors like visibility and engagement. Strong brand awareness helps establish credibility and attract a more relevant following and build a more relevant network. For companies and individual creators, brand awareness is vital for credibility. Shield tracks both reach and engagement, making it easy to track progress and adapt your content for a stronger brand recognition on LinkedIn.

Brand Awareness

Call to Action (CTA)

A CTA is a prompt that encourages people to take a specific action, such as clicking a link, commenting, or following. Effective CTAs can increase engagement and drive traffic to your content or profile. Use Shield to save posts containing your best CTAs. Shield’s “collections” feature makes this easy. Use and reuse the CTAs that work the best.

Call to Action (CTA)

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the percentage of people who click on a link in your LinkedIn content. CTR is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions. High CTR indicates that your content is compelling and relevant to your audience. Use Shield to track how people move from your content to your profile, increasing profile views, and new followers. That’s how you can consider your CTR within the LinkedIn platform itself.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Comments

Comments are responses from LinkedIn members on your posts, providing a direct way to engage and build relationships. Comments are also your replies to content from others. LinkedIn comments signal high engagement and can increase the visibility of your content in the LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn comments is a valuable engagement metric. Shield tracks your comments, and helps you understand the type of content that drives most engagement across different metrics. This allows you to build a more engaging community by creating more of the content that drives engagement.

Comments

Consistency

Consistency on LinkedIn means posting and engaging regularly to maintain visibility and build trust with your audience. By sharing content consistently, you increase the chances of reaching a broader audience, reinforcing your brand, and fostering ongoing engagement. Consistency also helps the LinkedIn algorithm recognize your activity, potentially boosting the reach of your posts and profile over time. Shield tracks your post frequency and shows you how your activity evolves over time. This helps you stay consistent which is necessary to achieve real results, real impact, over time.

Consistency

Content Strategy

A content strategy on LinkedIn is a plan for creating and sharing valuable, relevant content that aligns with your goals, such as growing your network, enhancing brand awareness, or driving engagement. It includes defining target audience interests, selecting content types (e.g., posts, articles, videos), and setting a consistent posting schedule. A strong content strategy helps ensure that your LinkedIn presence is impactful and aligned with audience expectations, building authority over time. Shield helps you track and measure content performance over time, helping you learn what works and what doesn’t across content types. This way you can easily adapt and refine your strategy to maximize reach and engagement on LinkedIn.

Content Strategy

Corporate Influencer

A corporate influencer is a professional who shares content and engages an audience to promote their company’s values, products, or services. LinkedIn is a popular platform for corporate influencers due to its professional network and focus. A corporate influencer is in many ways similar to a brand ambassador. For companies looking to leverage corporate influencers as a strategy in their corporate communications, tracking their activities, performance and impact becomes essential. With Shield’s corporate influencer tool it’s easy to measure the performance of corporate influencers, so you can refine the overall strategy and amplify brand reach organically.

Corporate Influencer

Credibility

Credibility on LinkedIn reflects how trustworthy and knowledgeable you appear to your network, often built through consistent, high-quality content, professional interactions, and an optimized profile. Strong credibility helps reinforce your expertise, making others more likely to engage with your content, seek your advice, or consider you for potential roles or partnerships. On Shield, tracking your profile views and follower growth is an indicator of increased credibility on the LinkedIn platform.

Credibility

Dashboard

An analytics dashboard is a visual display of LinkedIn metrics and data, allowing you to track content performance and analyze trends over time. A dashboard like that provides a quick overview of key data points, making it easier to understand engagement and reach. The Shield dashboard brings all your LinkedIn data and metrics together in one place. This way you can easily learn what works and what doesn’t across all your content, for as many personal profiles as you need.

Dashboard

Data

Data on LinkedIn consists of all the metrics and information generated from your activity on the platform, such as reach and impressions, engagement rates, profile views, audience demographics, and follower growth. This data provides valuable insights into how effectively you’re reaching and resonating with your audience. By analyzing LinkedIn data, you can refine your strategy, optimize content, and track progress toward your goals. The Shield dashboard offers a deep dive into your personal LinkedIn data and metrics. From content performance to profile activity, we got you. Learn what works, what doesn’t, and what resonates with your target audience.

Data

Direct Messaging (DM)

DMs on LinkedIn allow users to send private messages to each other, to connections, making DMs ideal for networking, outreach, or sharing opportunities. Personalized DMs help foster stronger relationships and open doors to collaboration. While Shield doesn’t directly track DMs, the platform can support your outreach strategy by providing insights into which posts and topics resonate most, helping you create effective, relevant DM conversations.

Direct Messaging (DM)

Earned Media Value

Earned media value quantifies the reach and exposure your content gains through organic engagement, like reactions, reposts, and comments. It’s often viewed as “free (earned) advertising” and can enhance credibility when others advocate for your brand. Shield shows your earned media value right on the Shield dashboard in real time based on your actual impressions at any given moment, for any period you choose. Your earned media value helps you understand the effectiveness of organic content compared to paid channels.

Earned Media Value

Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by its employees, often by creating and sharing content, or by engaging with posts on LinkedIn. Employee advocacy boosts brand visibility, amplifies employee loyalty, and makes the company appear more relatable and trustworthy. Shield’s employee advocacy software is all you need to track your organic LinkedIn activities across any number of employees. Shield provides you impression numbers per post, per profile, as well as engagement metrics and profile activity, plus more. All in one user-friendly dashboard. This makes it a lot easier to evaluate your employee advocacy efforts, and adapt according to what the data and information tell you.

Employee Advocacy

Engagement Rate

Engagement rate measures to what extent users interact with your LinkedIn content, calculated by dividing total engagements (likes, comments, reposts) by impressions. It’s a key metric for assessing how well your content resonates with your audience. Tracking engagement rate with Shield is easy. The number is calculated for you for all your content. This helps you stay on top of the most engaging content. Pair that with audience demographics to really understand what works with your target audience.

Engagement Rate

Experience Optimization

Experience optimization refers to the overall experience of using LinkedIn by improving content, engagement strategies, and personalization. This can increase audience satisfaction and engagement. Shield’s metrics, data and insights can help you improve the overall experience your audience has with you, your content, and ultimately, your personal brand. In short, do more of what works, what gets you the most relevant engagement, and less of what doesn’t.

Experience Optimization

Followers

Followers are LinkedIn users who subscribe to see your content in their feed - to follow your LinkedIn profile. Growing your follower base expands your reach and potential for engagement, which can be key for personal branding, influence, authority and credibility on the LinkedIn platform. For creators, influencers and brands alike, follower growth is a key success metric. Shield lets you track and measure your follower growth over time, helping you build a more engaged and relevant audience.

Followers

Funnel

A LinkedIn funnel represents the journey of turning strangers into profile views, into connections, followers, and ultimately clients or collaborators. Each stage requires a different approach, from awareness to engagement and conversion. For LinkedIn users building relationships or sales leads, an optimized funnel is crucial. Shield’s social selling software reveals which content resonates most, enabling a more targeted approach to profile growth, conversations and conversions down the line.

Funnel

Goals

Goals on LinkedIn are specific objectives you set to guide your activity and measure success. Goals are often related to increasing engagement, growing your network, or enhancing brand visibility. Clear goals help you stay focused, track progress, and adapt your strategy to achieve meaningful outcomes on the platform. With Shield, you can easily track your progress towards goals related to your LinkedIn metrics, such as impression count, engagement, or new followers.

Goals

Goal Setting

Goal setting on LinkedIn involves defining specific, measurable objectives for profile growth, engagement, or other performance metrics. Setting clear goals can guide your LinkedIn strategy and help track progress over time. With Shield, you can easily track your progress towards goals related to your LinkedIn metrics, such as impression count, engagement, or new followers.

Goal Setting

Hashtag Strategy

Hashtag strategy involves selecting relevant hashtags for your LinkedIn posts to increase visibility and reach target audiences. Effective hashtag use can improve discoverability, making your content visible to a broader audience. Shield tracks post performance across different hashtags by using Collections or Search. This gives you actionable insights into which hashtags drive the most engagement, helping you fine-tune your strategy for better reach and visibility on LinkedIn.

Hashtag Strategy

Headline

Your LinkedIn headline is a brief description under your name that highlights your expertise and attracts attention. A compelling headline can improve profile views and give others a clear sense of your professional identity. The headline is shown on your profile, but also under your name alongside the comments you make across posts on LinkedIn. While Shield doesn’t directly track headline performance, insights from Shield can help you refine your headline by showing which content themes attract the most engagement and views.

Headline

Hook

A hook is typically the first line of text on your LinkedIn post. The opening sentence or phrase that captures attention and encourages users to read more. Strong hooks are essential for boosting engagement and making content memorable. Shield tracks all your content, including engagement rates, which may give you insights into what posts (and hooks) resonate most with your audience. By comparing post performance, you can refine your hooks to better capture attention. Make sure you use Collections on Shield to save posts with great hooks to be reused later.

Hook

Impressions

Impressions represent the number of times your LinkedIn posts are displayed on users' feeds, regardless of engagement. High impressions may indicate good visibility, but analyzing alongside engagement metrics can provide more insights. Shield tracks impressions on all organic posts from any number of personal LinkedIn profiles connected to the Shield platform. This makes it easy to stay on top of your overall impressions in a given time period, or across a group of people aiming towards the same goals, as seen with employee advocacy programs and corporate influencer initiatives.

Impressions

Influencers

Influencers on LinkedIn are individuals with significant authority and reach, who shape opinions within their industry.

Influencers

Influencers on LinkedIn are individuals with significant authority and reach, who shape opinions within their industry.

Influencers

Influencers on LinkedIn are individuals with significant authority and reach, who shape opinions within their industry.

Influencers

Influencers on LinkedIn are individuals with significant authority and reach, who shape opinions within their industry.

Insights

Insights are data-driven observations about your LinkedIn performance, often encompassing metrics like audience demographics, content effectiveness, and engagement trends. Insights provide valuable guidance for refining strategy. On Shield you’ll find plenty of insights from your own LinkedIn data if you’re not afraid of getting your hands dirty. Look for content with high engagement among the right target audience. Or explore when you gain most followers and what content was posted in the same time period.

Insights

Just-in-Time Content

Just-in-time content is content created to address a current trend or immediate need, making it highly relevant to your audience. On LinkedIn, this could mean posting about recent industry changes or news, which can boost engagement because of the timeliness and relevance of the content piece itself.

Just-in-Time Content

Key Metrics

Key metrics are the most important metrics to track LinkedIn success, such as impressions, engagement rate, and follower growth. Focusing on these helps optimize performance and understand what drives results. Shield tracks all your LinkedIn data and metrics in one place, including impressions, engagement (reactions, comments, reposts), engagement rate, profile views, overall activity, and follower growth. Everything you need to learn what works and what doesn’t on Linkedin.

Key Metrics

Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization involves using strategic keywords in your LinkedIn profile and content to increase visibility in search results. It’s essential for being found by the right audience and improving profile discoverability. Shield tracks all your content and with our precise search feature, you can easily find content using specific words, phrases or hashtags. In other words, with Shield, keyword analysis and keyword optimization becomes a breeze.

Keyword Optimization

Lead Generation

Lead generation on LinkedIn is the process of identifying and attracting potential clients or collaborators. Through content, networking, and outreach, LinkedIn offers various tools to support lead generation. Shield tracks all your content and makes it easy for you to understand what drives the most engagement. Make sure you check audience demographics to understand if your content is reaching the right people. And make sure you check regularly who engages with your content to ensure that those people are also relevant to your lead generation efforts.

Lead Generation

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform where users connect, share content, and explore career opportunities. With features like profiles, posts, and messaging, LinkedIn helps users build their personal brand, engage with industry insights and other members, and foster meaningful professional relationships. It’s widely used by job seekers, recruiters, companies, and thought leaders to network, showcase expertise, and grow their influence in their fields. And more recently, LinkedIn is used by creators from all walks of life all over the world, increasingly becoming the most vibrant, genuine and generous social platform on the internet. For people creating content and engaging on LinkedIn, Shield’s LinkedIn analytics makes tracking post and profile performance easy. Shield is a powerful tool used by thousands of brands and creators all over the world to learn what works and what doesn’t.

LinkedIn algorithm

The LinkedIn algorithm is the set of rules that determine what content appears in users' feeds based on relevance and engagement. Algorithms are always changing with the goal of serving users the most relevant, helpful and engaging content possible. Trying to really understand LinkedIn’s distribution algorithms is a lost cause. Instead, use Shield to learn from your own content. That way you do what you actually can to stay data-driven, adapting your content and strategy to what your very own data actually reveals. Whether you aim for more impressions, higher engagement rate, or new followers, the Shield platform covers your tracking needs.

LinkedIn algorithm

LinkedIn feed

The LinkedIn feed is the main content stream users see when they log in to the LinkedIn platform, featuring posts, articles, and updates from their connections, followed pages, suggested content, and ads. The feed is tailored by LinkedIn's algorithms based on relevance, engagement, and user interests, making it a key place to share content, engage with others, and stay updated on industry trends. Organic content in particular thrives on the LinkedIn platform enabling millions of users to reach their target audience. Shield tracks organic content performance from personal profiles, meaning everything you post that goes into the LinkedIn feed. Using Shield will help you understand what content attracts the most engagement and visibility among your target audience.

LinkedIn feed

LinkedIn presence

LinkedIn presence refers to the overall visibility and activity of you and your profile on the LinkedIn platform. This includes the quality of your content, engagement with others, and network growth. Your LinkedIn presence is closely related to your personal brand, as a strong LinkedIn presence enhances credibility, keeps your profile top of mind, and can attract new opportunities in your industry. Shield keeps track of key metrics related to your LinkedIn profile and your activity on the LinkedIn platform, such as follower growth, post impressions and engagement rates. These metrics, and more, help you dial in on your LinkedIn presence, targeting the right people at the right time. People using Shield amplify and expand their LinkedIn presence over time.

LinkedIn presence

LinkedIn users

LinkedIn users are professionals using the LinkedIn platform to build and expand their network, share insights, seek opportunities, and engage with content as well as other users. Historically, LinkedIn users kept their CVs updated for recruiters to find them. Today, LinkedIn users are still job seekers and recruiters, but increasingly LinkedIn users are industry leaders, influencers, and content creators, leveraging the LinkedIn platform to build businesses, grow their careers, build and establish their personal brands, and stay informed about industry trends. Shield empowers active LinkedIn users to track and measure their content and profile performance, all in one place, making it easy to learn what works and what doesn’t. To work smarter, not harder, to grow their LinkedIn presence, establish thought leadership and build a long lasting personal brand.

LinkedIn users

Media value

Media value, also referred to as earned media value, means the estimated worth of media exposure, calculated by the cost equivalent if it had been paid for as advertising. It’s used to measure the impact and reach of media coverage, and often includes earned media like PR and organic mentions. Media value aims to give a financial perspective on visibility generated through non-paid means. Shield provides you an earned media value estimation based on your organic impressions. The estimation updates in real time right on your Shield dashboard, as your organic impressions go up. Earned media value on Shield is often used to report back to leadership or other key stakeholders, showing the worth of organic initiatives on LinkedIn in a language such stakeholders can relate to (i.e. money language, dollar signs).

Media value

Mentions

Mentions occur when a user tags another LinkedIn profile in a post or comment, increasing visibility and encouraging engagement. Mentions are useful to highlight other LinkedIn users, or bring their attention to a post or comment. While Shield does not track mentions of your profile, you can use Shield’s powerful search to find all posts you have published mentioning a specific person (word, or hashtag). This makes it super easy to demonstrate the earned media value related to campaigns or certain brand mentions.

Mentions

Messages

Messages, also known as DMs, allow LinkedIn users to communicate directly, enabling personalized conversations for networking, outreach, and relationship building. Effective messaging builds rapport and can lead to new opportunities. While Shield does not track direct messages or any private conversations on the LinkedIn platform, we do know that great content leads to many more relevant conversations and DMs. We recommend you start there. Create a backdrop of relevant content that people can look into. All your DMs will be much more pleasant and relevant as a result.

Messages

Metrics

Metrics are measures of certain activities. On LinkedIn, metrics relate to data points tracking LinkedIn content and profile performance and activity, such as post frequency, post impressions and engagement, profile views and follower growth. Metrics offer valuable feedback and insights into what’s working, and help guide strategy adjustments. Shield provides you all your key LinkedIn metrics in one place, the Shield dashboard. Everything from content metrics such as impressions, engagement, engagement rate, and audience demographics, to profile metrics such as post activity, profile views, follower growth and more. Shield is the preferred tracking tool for brands and content creators worldwide who show up consistently on the LinkedIn platform.

Metrics

Native content

Native content on LinkedIn is content posted directly on the platform, such as posts, articles and videos, rather than links to external sites. Native content often performs better since LinkedIn prioritizes native content in the LinkedIn feed, to keep you engaged instead of going elsewhere. Shield tracks and measures all native content published from personal LinkedIn profiles connected to Shield, including all content types such as posts, videos, carousels, and even reposts of company page posts. Shield is built to track organic, native content, and has done so since 2019.

Native content

Network

A network on LinkedIn is the group of connections and followers on your profile. Your audience are those who see your content. Your community (and fans) are those who engage with your content, support your goals, and help broaden your professional reach. Building a strong, ever expanding network by connecting with like-minded professionals and industry peers can expand your influence, enhance opportunities for collaboration, and provide valuable insights into your field. Shield tracks your LinkedIn network growth across key metrics such as followers and connections. And before people become either, Shield tracks your content metrics and impressions that may drive profile views and new followers and connections as a result of showing up in the feed.

Network

Network growth

Network growth measures the increase in LinkedIn connections and followers, reflecting profile reach and influence. A growing network can lead to more engagement and opportunities. Shield tracks both follower and connection growth on your LinkedIn profile, as well as related metrics such as profile views and audience demographics (from your published content).

Network growth

Network growth measures the increase in LinkedIn connections and followers, reflecting profile reach and influence. A growing network can lead to more engagement and opportunities. Shield