How To Boost Your LinkedIn Profile Views
On LinkedIn, profile views are a reliable indicator of your relevancy and influence among other users. With that said, many successful professionals and entrepreneurs struggle to draw a meaningful volume of profile visitors.
The good news for those with routinely low view counts is that there are simple steps anyone can take to significantly increase those numbers. Here are five ways to resolve your LinkedIn profile view woes once and for all.
1. Adjust your privacy settings.
If you feel you aren’t getting as many profile views as you should be, there’s a good chance your privacy settings are to some extent limiting your view count. You can check these settings by going to the Settings & Privacy page for your account.
Under your privacy settings, scroll through and try to identify any privacy restrictions that could make your profile less visible to the public. For example, if your settings block your profile from appearing on your organization’s page, users browsing that page will have a harder time finding you.
It’s common for a user to set up restrictive privacy settings when they first create an account and before they fully understand how the platform works. If you fall into that bucket, go back to the Settings & Privacy page to adjust any settings that are no longer appropriate for you and could be costing you profile views and engagement.
2. Make your profile search friendly.
Optimizing your profile for the right keywords makes it easier for other users to find you using LinkedIn’s search feature. When I first began using LinkedIn, I found that there were dozens of other people named Brian Hart on the platform, so my profile would rarely show up in search results for people trying to find me.
If you have a common name like I do, make that your top priority from a keyword optimization standpoint, as that will often be the search term a person trying to find you will enter. Make sure your profile is complete from top to bottom, then create a custom URL for your page that includes your full name.
Include your full name in several other areas of your profile, starting with your summary. Stuffing the same keyword into the same section of your profile several times won’t add search value, but using it at least once in multiple sections throughout your profile will increase the likelihood that it appears in relevant searches.
Once the profile has been optimized for your name, take it a step further by optimizing for other keywords including your company, location, position, industry and skills. By increasing your search visibility, you will steadily increase your monthly profile views.
3. Use the publishing platform.
While LinkedIn’s publishing platform has become saturated over the past few years, it can still be a valuable resource to help attract more profile views. And if you can get one of your articles to go viral, your profile views can explode rather quickly.
Since I began using the platform back in 2014, I’ve published a few dozen articles. One in particular sparked a huge debate and outperformed the rest, generating over ten thousand likes and nearly a thousand comments. For months while the article was hot, I picked up several new profile views every day and far exceeded my normal volume of monthly views.
If you already contribute to a company blog or personal blog, you can be active by simply republishing each post on the platform. If nothing else, it helps you appear active and visible to your network. But if an article goes viral, you can expect a huge spike in profile views.
4. Post regularly.
Posting regularly on LinkedIn keeps you relevant, which is a fundamental component for attracting profile views. If you never know what to post, the key is to create a system.
Decide on a few types of content that you’ll always want to share. Let’s say those are press recognition for your organization, your own blog posts and event announcements for a charity you’re involved with. Now that you’ve identified those, you’ll know every time you have a link for one of those three items, you’ll share it with your LinkedIn network.
Once you feel comfortable with that system, you can expand it to include your reactions to interesting industry articles, photos and other more spontaneous forms of content. By staying active on LinkedIn, you make it easier for others to find you.
5. Engage others.
Too often, LinkedIn users neglect the social aspect of social media, only focusing on self-promotion and other agendas. To increase your profile views, however, you need to make yourself visible to second and third degree networks.
Each time you comment on a friend or coworker’s post, your comments are visible to those people’s networks. If you make it a habit to regularly engage others each week, that visibility among extended networks will naturally attract more profile views.
By generating more LinkedIn profile views, you can unlock a pipeline to new connections and business opportunities. Start with the steps above, and your LinkedIn views and overall experience will rise up in a big way.
This article was originally published in Brian Hart’s Inc column. View original article.
Brian Hart is the founder and president of Flackable, a national public relations agency headquartered in Philadelphia. Follow Brian on Twitter at @BrianHartPR.
