Throughout your networking effort on LinkedIn, you’ve probably been curious about who saw your profile.
Maybe they want to reach out to you, send you a job offer, or are just stalking you.
Luckily, LinkedIn allows you to see who viewed your profile in just a few clicks.
In this guide, we are exploring LinkedIn’s profile view feature and what you can do with the information it provides you with.
Let’s get started.
What Is LinkedIn’s ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’ Feature?
To understand this feature we need to understand what are LinkedIn profile views.
LinkedIn profile views is the number of times your profile has been seen by another LinkedIn user.
To dive deeper into who exactly viewed your profile LinkedIn has its “Who Viewed Your Profile” feature.
It allows you to accurately see who viewed your profile within the last 90 days with view analytics included.
Here’s how to access this feature:
- While on LinkedIn look for “Analytics & tools” in the left navigation and click on it.
- Click on the “Profile viewers” option among other analytics tools.
This is where your profile view information is located and you can start exploring.
An important thing to note is the information access LinkedIn provides you with depending on your plan:
1. LinkedIn Basic – Discover only the five most recent profile viewers within the last 90 days.
2. LinkedIn Premium – Discover the entire list of LinkedIn viewers from the last 90 days. Also, with the LinkedIn Premium plan, you have full access to weekly viewer insights, including the percentage of increase or decrease in viewers.
How To Use LinkedIn’s Profile View Feature
As mentioned above, if you have a basic LinkedIn plan you will have limited information about who viewed your profile.
This includes the number of people that viewed your profile and a free way to view the 5 latest users that clicked on your profile.
The whole list of profile views and people you might be interested in will be locked behind the premium plan.
If you are on a premium plan your experience will be much different.
Knowing Who Viewed Your Profile With LinkedIn Premium
LinkedIn Premium takes this feature to a whole new level with many new options at your disposal.
Firstly, you will get a timeline of your profile views at certain points in time.
This will help you see trends and how you should optimize your profile to get the most views.
To get even more information from this graph you can use filters letting you customize the graph view.
These filters include:
- Date range
- Company
- Industry
- Location
These filters will help you filter out the irrelevant profile views and focus on the types of people you are looking to attract to your profile.
Under the graph, there’s an option to see the statistics of who viewed your profile in the selected period measured in percentages.
But the best feature a premium plan lets you do is view the people that clicked on your profile without any restrictions.
You can see their picture, and headline, if they are a connection, and when they viewed your profile after which you can click on their profile and proceed to connect or explore.
There’s also a special filter called “Interesting Views” which if turned on will only show you viewers LinkedIn thinks might be very interesting to you.
These profiles are shown based on your interests, the profiles you are visiting, and your intention with LinkedIn.
As you can see, having a premium LinkedIn plan gives you many more options in analyzing who viewed your profile and more opportunities to use this information.
How Accurate Are LinkedIn Profile Views?
LinkedIn profile views are very accurate as they show you exactly who viewed your profile with their correct information.
You can enter their profiles and see exactly who they are.
Note that if a viewer is using a private profile, you will be notified of a profile view, but won’t be able to view their information.
If you aren’t using a premium account, your information will be limited, but the number of views will be accurate.
Profile views are so accurate that you can use them as KPIs in your sales/job search strategies.
What To Do LinkedIn Profile View Information?
Many LinkedIn users see the profile view feature as a novelty metric, but there are huge insights you can extract from it:
- Understand the type of users visiting your profile and what they are looking for.
- Knowing if your profile is well optimized and how well it’s performing.
- The companies interested in doing business with you.
- Understanding every aspect of your profile viewers (location, industry, position…).
- Knowing which posts are generating the most profile visits.
Profile views are an excellent way of tracking your performance when it comes to job search, sales, recruiting…
You can easily see if recruiters are visiting your profile, which companies they work for, and optimize your profile to land a great job.
If you are selling, you can identify potential leads from people visiting your profile and reach out to them.
This is all well and good, but what should you actually do when someone views your profile?
Expand Your Network
Take the opportunity of a profile view to connect with new people and grow your network.
There is always a reason they clicked on your profile, but it’s on you to reach out and start a conversation.
A big plus is that you have information about them like the industry they are working in giving you a way to personalize your connection request.
Offer Your Service
If someone visits your profile, chances are they saw what you have to offer, especially if you have a customer-centric featured section.
People that view your profile are potential clients, it’s up to you to reach out and present your offer.
A message like this can help:
“Hey {{firstName}},
I’d love to connect with you and see how I can help you with {{problem you are solving}}.”
We recommend reaching out directly and offering your services if you notice them viewing your profile multiple times.
This means they are very interested in you.
Save Them For Later
Many times important people can view our profile, leads, potential employees, investors…
But we might not be looking to contact them right away as it’s not the right time or we need to do more research.
We also don’t want to lose them.
The best way to keep track of these profile viewers is to track them in your LeadDelta.
You can import 2nd and 3rd-degree connections that view your profile by entering their profile and clicking “Add to LeadDelta” in the Sidebar.
They will be stored in your database and you will be able to add Notes and Tags for better organization.
Once you are ready to contact them, simply Filter for them and send them a connection request.
Reconnect With Your Network.
Did you notice one of your direct connections viewed your profile?
This is the opportunity to reconnect with them after some time of not talking.
A simple message like:
“Hey {{firstName}},
Thanks for visiting my profile. I just noticed we haven’t spoken for some time, how are things going with {{topoc}}?
I would love to reconnect and talk for a bit.”
Profile views can act as reminders to people we might have neglected and a potential new business opportunity from an old friend.
Improve Your Profile
People are viewing your profile for a reason and if they aren’t connecting with you there might be problems with your profile.
Maybe they didn’t understand who you are and what you can help them with.
If you notice you have high views, but low connection requests this means something isn’t working.
Take a look at your profile picture, banner, and summary section and improve them.
Use profile views and connections as a measurement of how well your profile is doing and who it is attracting.
Make small adjustments and watch the number of views and connections grow.
Conclusion
Whether you are looking for a new job or selling, the profile view feature is crucial to your success on LinkedIn.
It helps you optimize your profile and gather useful data about people that visit your profile.
Use it wisely in your networking efforts and utilize its data to achieve your networking goals.
