Who Viewed Your Profile remains a popular feature on LinkedIn. After looking at thousands of profile viewers, here are a few things I figured out.
1) Anonymous viewers are just noise.
That’s because they have no value whatsoever. Are they possible customers? Competitors? Suppliers or vendors? Headhunters? Who knows? I sure don’t and I won’t find out either, so why agonize over them?
I don’t know why LinkedIn even shows users that they had anonymous viewers as it just winds up pissing those people off and making them mad at…LinkedIn.
2) A lot of my profile viewers are likely bots
One of the sad facts of life on LinkedIn is that people still use automation to view profiles, figuring it will spur the viewee to reach out to them. But if someone is using an automated program they likely have no idea that “they” viewed your profile. I have reached out to people who viewed my profile and it is apparent that they have no clue who I am and that they didn’t go to my profile, but their software did.
I continue to struggle to see the value in a profile view where the viewer does not know they viewed my profile.
3) My profile was sending my viewers elsewhere
Profiles come with a “helpful” sidebar called “People also viewed.” This sidebar will list profiles that the viewer may also want to check out. This feature is very useful to the viewer and to LinkedIn who gets the viewer to spend more time on LinkedIn, but it sure isn’t helpful to me.
To my mind, two things can result from this list, both of them bad:
This list often will contain some of your competitors, and even if it doesn’t, the last thing you want is to be presenting a list of “you may find these profiles more interesting than the one you are reading now” candidates.
You can remove this sidebar in your Settings. Just go to Privacy and Settings > Account Settings > Site preferences. It’s (currently) the sixth item under Site Preferences.
4) “Found you via” is pretty badly incomplete
LinkedIn has a bunch of categories here, showing if people found me through messaging, their homepage, their network, people similar to them and so on.
But for a large number of your visitors – 70% of mine when I looked just now – there is no source listed at all. So I am unsure what conclusions I can draw about sources with such an incomplete dataset. Actually, I take that back. There is one conclusion I can draw….
5) People are probably not coming to your profile via LinkedIn search
I checked my own stats. In the past 13 weeks, LinkedIn tells me 25 of my profile viewers came to my profile after doing a lInkedIn search, or less than two a week. But LinkedIn also tells me that I have appeared in 160 searches in the past week. So “appearing” in search results does not appear to generate much in the way of profile views.
And let me close with one observation. I have found that the profile views that do help me are when I can see several associated people from the same company all viewed my profile. That’s smoke that I want to investigate further to see if there is fire there too.
Do you look at who viewed your profile?
