March 10, 2012
As a LinkedIn profile writer, I am often the first to notice changes to LinkedIn. Just yesterday I was working on the profile of an IT Consultant specializing in the Dental industry, when I noticed a pretty big change to the Who’s Viewed Your Profile sidebar widget.
Please note, this change has not been rolled out across the board yet, in fact, I haven’t seen it on any other profile.
The one thing I have noticed helping professionals maximize their use of LinkedIn is that very few people EVER look at this awesome widget.
The Who’s Viewed Your Profile widget is a great way to benchmark the success of your LinkedIn profile. This widget appears on the right sidebar of both your LinkedIn Home page AND your Edit profile page. It shows you the stats for how many times your profile was viewed in 1 to 90 days and how many times your profile turned up in search results any time over the past 1 to 90 days.
I shouldn’t have to tell you that if your profile is not getting many views OR it’s simply not turning up in searches, you need to optimize your LinkedIn profile!
Here’s how the widget has looked for pretty much forever:
The new look is much more artistic showing intersecting circles. Unfortunately, from what I can see, this new design lacks some of the detail of the old design.
The daily views and the number of times your profile appeared in search is missing. Here’s the thing, you can click on the widget and you are transported to the Profile Stats page where you can see more detail. The detail omits the daily number and instead shows you a graph where you can see how your profile is performing over a 90 day period. The other issue is the reporting is in arrears… it’s not your current numbers showing but rather the month before’s statistics.
As you can see in this screenshot I took JUST NOW, the date is March 10th but the last reported week of the graph is February 26th.
Perhaps LinkedIn is in the process of beefing up the Profile Stats page… or by forcing more people to that page, they are hoping that more people upgrade to a higher plan because that’s where you can see exactly who has viewed your profile. The basic, free plan only shows you the last 5 people. If you want to see the last 90 days of visitors to your profile, you have to pony up and upgrade to a paid plan.
My suggestion to my clients is to upgrade to LinkedIn’s Personal Plus plan. This LinkedIn plan is only $7.95 a month if paid annually! That’s less than $100 a year! The thing is, LinkedIn is sneaky. The only place you can find this cheap LinkedIn plan is on the Profile Stats page.
Regardless, the Personal Plus plan is nearly perfect for the casual LinkedIn user. You get to see viewers of your profile over the last 90 days… and that is awesome! Think of the possibilities! You also get to see the keywords people are using to find you in search. This means you can see how successfully optimized your profile is for your desired keywords.
I look forward to seeing how LinkedIn rolls out this improved widget. Hopefully we will see even more detail in the Profile Stats page!
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I do not have the new interface yet, but I also noticed a change. Specifically, the list of 5 people viewing my profile is for “last week”! At first I thought it was because I had temporarily subscribed to a Premium LI account (a research project for work). When I switched back to the free version, a bunch of free features were crippled. I had to email support and get them to reset my account. To their credit, their support was VERY responsive.
I believe that LI is quietly making tweaks to it’s product to get people into a paid version. As a former product manager, I would probably be advocating such actions. And, the gradual, “quiet” approach is probably smart. Though they will likely be slammed for not being transparent and “up front” about the changes. I am glad to see the Personal option. Will be interesting to see how this all pans out.
Hi Donna,
I utilize the 90 day graph almost daily to see how many times I’m coming up in searches. In fact, it’s very encouraging as I was invisible a year ago, but have seen it steadily increase from 30/day to over 90/day…
In order to see this information, would I need to upgrade to the $7.95 plan?
Thanks for staying so current on LinkedIn! I’m showing off your profile ALL the time! Email me anytime!