Who Views Your LinkedIn™ Profile? 

How I discovered what my LinkedIn profile™ really does for me

Most people think their LinkedIn™ profile is something they can use so that whoever it is they want to have find them – suppliers, customers, potential business partners, possible future employers – can find them. 

But is that the case? For the vast majority of your profile visitors, probably not.

I say probably, because you used to be able to see where your profile visitors came from. With my Sales Navigator account, I can see who viewed my profile for the past ninety days. When they could, LinkedIn™ used to identify where my individual profile viewers came from. You would see such things as: My Network, Homepage, Messaging, People Similar To You, and Search. Well, that’s gone. My assumption is that it will reappear as a premium only feature at some point.  

While this attribution feature was available, I made a point of reviewing my profile viewers and one thing that struck me was hardly anyone seemed to be finding me via Search. Several times I went back and counted the number of people over the ninety day period to see how many of my profile viewers came via Search. The average was just over one percent. That’s it. Almost no one was finding me via Search.

Now, my LinkedIn™ profile is pretty good. I know my SEO basics and I know the keywords that should be there, and what people should be searching for to find someone like me. But one percent? That’s it?

So where was everyone else coming from? We’re talking about hundreds of people a month here. Well, some came from Messaging, which makes sense when you think about it. In a typical situation, you are trading messages, usually with a new connection, and you want to check something on their profile. But the vast majority of my viewers had either seen something I had written, or I was mentioned in someone’s post, or someone they knew had mentioned my name, or I had commented on something and that brought them to my profile. The bottom line was people were coming to my profile for one of two reasons. They were asking:

• Just who is this guy?
• Is he who he says he is?

What it amounts to is people are looking at my profile as a kind of reference check. They are curious about me and they want to know more, in my case, usually more about why I talk about using LinkedIn™ for sales and marketing.

So what does this imply for you? 

I don’t think your profile has to be an SEO machine. There just are not that many people looking for you or what you do. 

Or if they are looking for someone like you, they are doing it through their network, not LinkedIn™ search.

I think what your profile has to be is a reference check. When someone comes to your profile they want to know why you are an expert in your field and the implied question they have is “What can this person do to help me?” 

And there you go. These are the questions I think your profile needs to answer:

• What can you do for your ideal profile visitor?
• What benefits can you provide?
• What questions are you uniquely qualified to answer?
• Have you helped people in similar situations in the past?

This is only my opinion, but I think the idea that someone will find you via Search is a myth. They will find you from your display of what you know, or from hearing about you from someone else. The bottom line is people that are what I think of as “intelligently active” on LinkedIn™ – that is doing things like adding smart incisive comments to someone’s post – will be seen as people who merit more investigation via profile views. So want to be seen? Get involved.