How can you use Shield to grow your audience? What can you learn from your data?

Here are the top ways others are using data from Shield to do more of what works and keep bettering their content on LinkedIn.

The only thing you need is consistency. Keep creating and publishing content and the numbers will follow!

Let's look at the list!

Top 5 ways to use Shield

Track follower growth
Repurpose old content
Track monthly progress
Search for old content
Track popular topics

1. Track follower growth and key metrics

The Shield dashboard gives you the possibility to track all your top of the funnel stats. We see a lot of users' favourite view is Total Statistics. This is where you see all your Views, Likes, Comments, Shares, Engagement rate and the number of posts for the current time period compared to the like to like time period before. For e.g, If you say YTD, year to date it compares the same dates from the year before as in the picture below.

Where to find Total Stats?

On the main report section, just scroll down a bit and you see it right there!

Once you sign up for Shield, you are also able to track your followers. This is a great way to understand your audience growth.

Where to find your Follower growth card?

Once again right in the first section called trendlines, you will find it with all the other Stats. It's the first card in the last row.

2. Repurpose old content

This is by far the favourite of all our top creators. Hear from Justin Welsh on his winning formula ↓

Where do you find your old content?
Go to the content section and scroll down to the bottom to find the content table
Double click on the eye icon to sort by Views and repurpose your old post!

Tip: Only we remember all our old content. When you are posting consistently you are growing your audience. So, a lot of your audience has never seen this content anyway!

See what Evans has to say ↓

3. Track monthly progress

Averages are a powerful way to see if you are growing.

If your monthly average is higher than the last month's then clearly your current content is working.

Click on the blue toggle button to move your view from total to averages

Here you see my average for the month of March is way higher than February! My content is on average in March is getting 30,538 Views, 323 Reactions, 83 comments. It also shows that it is grown compared to the average stats of March.

Interesting thing here: You can see I posted more in March than in February. Consistency definitely helps boost numbers.

Tip: Compare your averages monthly, quarterly and annually to track your growth.

4. Search for old content

With Shield, you don't have to scroll for hours to find your old content.
Let's say I remember I posted about 9-5 jobs. And I want to find that post again.

All I need to do is to type the keywords in the search bar.

Now when I scroll down to the content table, it filters out and shows me only the content with those words.

Tip: Remember to set your date range wide enough so the post falls in the time frame.

Note: The search bar is available for the Influencer Plan. To upgrade follow the steps here.

5. Track popular topics

A very powerful feature on Shield is "labels". You can use labels to tag your content with key topics. Then you can compare different topics and see where you get the highest averages. A bit geeky but a great way to really let data guide you.

Here you can see I tagged my content with 4 different content topics.

Consistency: For all content where I talk about consistency

Benefits: Content that shows the benefits of personal branding on LinkedIn

Running: Content that talks about my personal passion and learnings from running and training for a marathon
Copywriting: Tips on how to write better on LinkedIn

Now, all I have to do is click on the topic label and check my average stats, see what works better and do more of that!