Tracking LinkedIn profile analytics with Airtable

Roughly half a year ago I switched from the "Connect" to the "Follow" button on my LinkedIn Profile. And I don't see why I ever want to switch back.

One of the big advantages for me is that I get fewer contact requests. And those I get tend to be with genuine interest to contact me.

But I didn't make the change only as a way to reduce spam in my contact request. LinkedIn is quickly becoming a social media for professionals, where content stands front and centre. And because of that, I think following people on the platform becomes more and more natural.

As I'm posting a lot for work, I have seen a little bit of growth in my followers over the last months. But it's really hard to pin down, how many followers I gained.

Unfortunately, Linkedin only offers analytics for company pages. Even though I would argue most content that is viewed comes from personal creators.

I was googling for a way to collect some simple analytics in LinkedIn. But the only option right now seems to be to use a paid service such as Inlytics. But I'm not really at a stage to pay for that at the moment.

So I thought about another way: Would there be a way to simply scrape the data from my profile and just log it into Airtable?

And turns out there is. It involves a bit of manual work, but it's still very fast and easy to set up. The only requirement is that you need Airtable Pro. So if you have that already, then setting this up should be a breeze.

Airtable Setup

Create a new Airtable base with the following fields:

1. Report Number (Type: Autonumber)
2. Followers (Type: Number)
3. Profile Views (Type: Number)
4. Created (Type: Created time)

Go to the app sidebar, and add "Web clipper" as an Airtable app. Also, make sure that have the Web Clipper installed and authentication in your browser.

Now open the Web Clipper app and create a new action called "Add LinkedIn Follower report". We are going to use CSS classes to get the right information from your "My profile" page on Linkedin. Add all fields to the Web Clipper with a default value of "Text content by CSS Selector".

The CSS Selectors you need are:

• Followers: .ember-view.link-without-visited-state .t-bold
• Profile Views: .profile-views .block
• Search appearencess: .search-appearances .block

I left out "Post Views" because it only shows the views of the last post you made. Which I find pretty meaningless. But if you want to add to your stats, the CSS selector is .update-views .block

Give it a try

Once you have everything set up, just go to your "My profile" page on LinkedIn, open the extension and click on the clipper action you have just created. If everything works out, you should see that the right numbers are pulled into the fields and you can add everything with one click to your Airtable base.

Repeat this once per week and you will soon have a nice database, where you can see your own LinkedIn statistics.