You want people to view your profile.
That means your LinkedIn strategy is working, and – if your LinkedIn profile was optimized – a chance to score a bunch of leads via your passive lead generation campaign.
LinkedIn has made it a “little” easier to check out who’s viewed your profile on LinkedIn via their feature of the same name.
But, what happens after someone has viewed your profile?
In today’s article, let’s take a look at how you can harness the profile viewers’ function on LinkedIn and hack your profile view growth.
How to Find Out Who’s Viewed Your Profile on LinkedIn
Finding out who’s viewed your profile on LinkedIn is different on Basic and Premium accounts.
The main difference is how many people get recorded over the same 90-day period. On Basic, it’s just a measly 5 people while Premium basically records everyone who’s paid a visit.
Basic
On LinkedIn Basic, you can head over to your profile where you can find a dashboard that will show you the last five people who’ve viewed your profile.
If you click on one of the numbers, it will take you to a new screen that will show you the profiles of the five mort recent visitors to your profile.
As you can see from this example, the option to message them is locked because you aren’t connected.
It’s different on Premium where you’ll have an option to connect with them.
Premium
If you’re on Premium, you can easily find out who’s viewed your profile on LinkedIn by heading over to your newsfeed.
On the right-hand pane of the Home tab, you’ll find the option to see how many people have viewed your profile.
When you click on the number, it will take you to the same new screen – just like LinkedIn Basic – that will show you a graph highlighting the viewing trends of your profile.
You can choose to hide this by clicking on “Hide trends”. I personally like this graph because it allows me to analyze which weeks brought in the most traffic on my profile.
This information can then be used to backtrack what was done on those heavy-traffic weeks.
The meat is at the bottom of this chart where you can find the profiles of the people who have viewed your profile.
What’s great about this area is that it also provides you with valuable insights about your profile visitors.
For example, it can track if a lot of people who work with a particular company are viewing your profile.
This helps you take a look at who your audience is and if you should be creating content that is relevant to their needs.
Adjusting Your Own Profile Viewing Settings
If you want to adjust your own profile viewing settings you can do so by heading over to settings, and going to the “Visibility” option in the left-hand pane.
Click on “Visibility of your profile & network”, then “Profile viewing options”, followed by “Change”.
This will now allow you to tweak your settings so that you can go in “stealth” mode and not appear on other people’s “Who’s Viewed My Profile” lists.
Now, going on stealth mode is a whole other topic on its own, but it’s helpful if you want to do some peeking on your competitors’ profiles.
How Can I Use These Profile Views
At BAMF, we always say:
“You can’t growth hack if you can’t track”.
And, who’s viewed your profile on LinkedIn metrics is a great way of tracking your progress on the platform.
We personally use the feature for our clients with Premium accounts to find out how much progress we’re making in terms of their reach.
Also, we can even find out if their profile has a good conversion ratio by checking out how many people have viewed their profile and interacted with the links on their profile (which are tracked of course via UTM).
This allows us to paint an accurate picture of how much progress we’re making with any particular client and set our goals for the next period.
But, that’s not all.
It’s also helpful for people who are looking for jobs, who have just gotten active on the platform, or if you just want a general check of your progress so far.
Running a Campaign
If you have a premium account – or even a basic one if you’re first starting out – you can run a campaign to target the people who’ve viewed your profile on LinkedIn.
Get a list of their profile names and use a tool like Phantombuster to track down their URLs and email addresses.
With this information you can:
- Put the emails in a custom audience list and retarget them on Facebook.
- Create a specialized lead nurturing campaign via Email – make sure you’ve got a workflow in place!
- Send them a personalized message saying hi.
- Throw their names into your CRM.
What’s important is that you do something with these profiles and not just leave them to stagnate on LinkedIn.
That wouldn’t be growth hacking.
Getting More Profile Viewers
We could talk about this section for days, but it all boils down to how you can get people interested in what you have to offer.
Here are some questions to ask yourself and tips to consider:
- LinkedIn Posts – How much often are you posting and are you posting content that gives people value? Let’s face people don’t like their time being wasted, and they won’t want to visit someone who doesn’t provide them with any value, regardless if the post was – or is currently – trending.
- LinkedIn SEO – Have you optimized your profile for LinkedIn search? If not you can check out our LinkedIn SEO guide.
- Is Your Profile Optimized – is your profile photo optimized? How about your headline? Is your cover photo colorful enough to draw people to click on your profile? All of these things improve your clickability.
- Outreach – are you creating good campaigns that get people hooked and curious? If you have a bunch of outreach campaigns ongoing, but your profile views are declining, then there’s something seriously wrong happening.
Takeaways
Keeping a handle on your LinkedIn views helps you monitor your progress on the platform.
It lets you analyze what weeks went well and what you can do to continue to have a steady stream of visitors to your profile.
But, that’s not all.
Knowing who exactly visited your profile is helpful in creating lead generation and nurturing campaigns that help bring in prospects into your funnels.
This simple trick is one of the best examples of growth hacking.
There are elements of tracking and analysis, and you get to use seemingly mundane features to make the most out of your lead generation.
You need to track these numbers.
Because as we say time and time again.
You can’t growth hack if you don’t track.
