Here at quintly we have been one of very few companies having access to posts published by any LinkedIn Company Page, enabling competitive benchmarking. This access was based on our agreement with LinkedIn being part of their LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.
End of June 2019, LinkedIn announced bigger changes to their permission system affecting how third parties like ourselves can ask Company Page owners to authenticate and grant access to data around their Pages. Over time further documentation was released explaining the change in more depth. A big question mark for us was for long whether LinkedIn will still support competitive benchmarking by allowing access to basic metrics around followers and posts of any Company Page, not just for those a user administers. Anticipating the changes in front of us, our research and tests were showing positive results.
Now, with the changes being effective since a few days, we can confirm LinkedIn has officially dropped support for competitive benchmarking except for tracking of public follower counts. Also documentation correctly references all post related API endpoints to only return data for Company Pages administered by the user authenticating.
As a direct consequence, public post data for LinkedIn Company Pages will not be updated anymore since a couple of days when the change became effective. This touches data within our data source linkedInUpdates. Follower counts within data source linkedIn will still be available and offered by LinkedIn’s API in the future. Post related metrics within data source linkedIn won’t update.
Independently our team has been working on integrating private statistics for LinkedIn Company Pages, with this feature being in beta stage for about 3 weeks. With public post data being gone, we have decided to move out of beta stage for private statistics of posts with immediate effect. We have been adding additional default metrics to our Discover section building on top of a new data source named linkedInAnalyticsOwnPosts. For customers tracking their own Company Pages, you will be able to build on top of this as a direct replacement for the public data sets. For customers relying on access to post data of third party Company Pages, we are sorry to say that this use case is not supported any longer by what LinkedIn provides via their API.
Therefore the following changes have been implemented with immediate effect:
Access to public post data for any LinkedIn Company Page has been deprecated. This affects data sources linkedIn and linkedInUpdates and related metrics. You will still be able to access data from the past, but data won’t update anymore. Please note that follower counts within data source linkedIn remain intact.
We are introducing access to private statistics of Company Page posts, requiring authentication of a user having the administrator role. You can start with the authentication of your LinkedIn Company Pages to access private post statistics in our profiles section right now. Simply click the “...” when hovering a given Company Page followed by clicking “Connect LinkedIn Analytics”. Once connected you will be able to access private statistics around posts for that Page. This data source will cover additional metrics like impressions and clicks that were not present within our public data sets. A new data source named linkedInAnalyticsOwnPosts will hold these data points. You will find additional default metrics within our Discover section to get started.
Our data source documentation within the Available data sources tab has been updated accordingly.
We are sorry for the inconvenience this is causing.
For customers tracking LinkedIn Company Pages, we are looking forward to discuss the options for your specific case. Please reach out to us at support@quintly.com or via live chat.