You ever get those emails from LinkedIn saying X number of people have looked at your profile? You know, the ones where they show you 5 people but to see the rest you must have a premium membership. It kind of makes you feel special but you may also be wondering who exactly was hanging out on your profile and what exactly were they looking for.Some of you on the more OCD end of the spectrum may upgrade your LinkedIn accounts just to ease that curiosity.
With LinkedIn premium upgrades that range from $7.95/month up to $74.95/month, the cost of alleviating that feeling for some people may be too hefty. To be fair, knowing who’s viewed your profile can actually provide benefits other than reducing the number of things you have available to ponder at night.
Luckily for you, I stumbled across a way where you can obtain this information at the great price of FREE. You can read about it and install it here, but I’ll tell you it’s a Chrome extension that saves the viewed history of your LinkedIn profile. I’m still checking it out but it seems to work pretty nicely.
Now, why should you care about who looked at your profile? I’m glad you asked – three immediate benefits come to mind.
Profile Search Optimization
Based on the people who view your profile you can tell the kinds of searches where your profile shows up. For example, my profile may be viewed by accountants or accounting recruiters all over the country when in fact I’ve switched into the management consulting industry, so what does this tell me? It tells me my profile has been optimized for search geared towards accounting and if I want to be found by more consulting industry folks I should probably change up my profile.
Job Leads
Knowing who viewed your profile can provide potential new leads on jobs. If you see someone, especially a recruiter, who works at one of your target companies viewed your profile, you may want to reach out to them or go to their profile see what groups are involved and see what you have in common and see if there’s a starting point for you to initiate that connection. Even if the person who view your profile isn’t working at a company on your list, it never hurts to see where people are plugged in and what interests they have. I’ve connect with many people through LinkedIn groups simply because I enjoy their contributions to the group’s discussions.
Customer Leads
Some of those people viewing your profile could also be potential customers. What better place for someone looking for professional service to go search than a professional social network. Another example…if you see a small business owner looking at your profile and you think they came across your profile because of your profession (perhaps you’re a star CPA who specializes in small businesses), it wouldn’t hurt to introduce yourself and offer whatever help is needed. Maybe you gain a customer or maybe you end up referring the person to someone else but hopefully you made a positive impression, and you never know where that’ll lead down the line.
At the end of the day it’s FREE so try it out and let me know what you think!
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