LinkedIn’s “Who Viewed Your Profile” listing is among the more useless social platform features, essentially showing you a group of people who visited your profile, but had no interest in making actual contact.
Which would kind of be like Tinder displaying all of the people who swiped left on your profile. Like, why would you want to know that?
But actually, LinkedIn’s display could be even worse, because some people actually use this as extremely passive contact. If you’re advertising a job, and I view your profile, maybe I’m interested in it, and if you contact me, maybe we can talk.
Basically, no one really knows what the heck this display is for, and while some will defend it, and claim that they’ve made “thousands” of valuable connections from the listing, for the majority of people, it’s pretty much a meaningless display of strangers who didn’t find you overly interesting.
Though this could help to change that.
As noted by social media expert Matt Navarra, LinkedIn recently made some updates to its “Interesting Views” section to include more specific notes on why a viewer is considered “interesting”.
To be clear, “Interesting Views” has been a filter within the “Who Viewed Your Profile” display for years, but it hasn’t always been obvious as to why LinkedIn has defined an “interesting” viewer in this respect.
As you can see in this example, now, LinkedIn will highlight people who are able to get you a job, who work for a company you follow, are a senior leader in your niche, etc.
It’ll also let you know if a “LinkedIn influencer” has looked at your profile, though what that means, exactly, is also a little unclear.
LinkedIn awards its “Top Voice” badges to people who contribute answers to its AI-powered Collaborative Articles, though that doesn’t really mean that they’re influential, as such, just that they spend time answering random questions on LinkedIn. If they’re included as a “LinkedIn Influencer”, then who cares? But then again, if it’s actual, high profile users, that could be of value, maybe, depending on the context.
Interestingly, LinkedIn’s also moving away from incentivizing platform creators to build their personal profile, because most of the LinkedIn creators that provide actual value are not online influencers, but are experts in their niche.
You would hope that it’s these experts that LinkedIn’s showcasing in this listing, but it’s not exactly clear on this.
So, will these additions make the “Who Viewed Your Profile” display more valuable?
Well, the more direct listings definitely provide more context, and that, in itself, could prompt more people to take action on such.
But really, LinkedIn would likely be better off removing the display entirely, and instead putting a flag on posts that people can easily tick, which indicates that they want to make contact with a member. The user can then choose if they want to reciprocate that contact or not, which would spark an actual interaction, as opposed to the passive use of this display.
Maybe people wouldn’t use that either, but still, I’m not sure that “Who Viewed Your Profile”, even with more insight, is a great value add.
