Profile and Network Statistics

LinkedIn offers features that track a variety of metrics related to your personal profile and the network of people that develops through your connections. These features are the best place to start for tracking your LinkedIn performance. While some data is only available to premium account holders, even Basic (free) LinkedIn members can gather enough information from the Profile Stats and Network Statistics features to determine whether their LinkedIn efforts are delivering positive growth.

Profile Stats

Profile Stats is available to all Basic account holders. Visit your LinkedIn profile and notice the module called Who’s Viewed Your Profile on the right side of the page, as shown in Figure 17.1. Here you can see the number of people who have viewed your LinkedIn profile in the past seven days and the number of times your profile showed up in LinkedIn searches during the past three days.

Figure 17.1: Click the link to see who viewed your profile.

QUICK TIP

Your Profile stats page displays up to five people who have viewed your profile as well as a trend graph that shows both the number of visits to your profile and the number of times your profile has appeared in search results during the previous 90 days.

WARNING

This is a great tool to make sure your profile is attracting the right kinds of people to help you reach your goals and to confirm that your profile traffic and search performance is improving over time. If not, you might need to increase your efforts to make yourself visible on LinkedIn (e.g., connect with more people, be more active in your updates and share and comment on other people’s updates, participate in groups, answer questions, and so on).

Profile Stats Pro

Premium LinkedIn account holders can access Profile Stats Pro (whether or not their visibility settings are set to anonymous), which offers more data than the standard Profile Stats feature does. For example, Profile Stats Pro provides the full list of everyone who has viewed your profile. However, if an individual has his own visibility settings configured to Anonymous, additional information about him won’t be accessible.

Furthermore, Profile Stats Pro offers information about visit and search trends just as the standard tool does, but the really useful data comes from the following:

• Keywords used to find your profile

• Industries people work in who viewed your profile

• Regions where people live who viewed your profile (provided on a country level)

If you’re targeting specific areas of the world or industries in your LinkedIn efforts, then Profile Stats Pro data can tell you whether people from the right countries and industries are finding your profile. You can also make sure the right keywords are leading people to your profile and discover new useful keywords that you might want to add to your profile to further leverage traffic from them.

Network Statistics

All LinkedIn members (even Basic account holders) can access the Network Statistics feature within LinkedIn by clicking the Contacts link in the top navigation bar (when you’re logged in to your LinkedIn account) and selecting My Connections from the drop-down list. This opens the My Connections page. Click the Network Statistics tab near the top of the page to open your Network Statistics page, shown in Figures 17.2 and 17.3.

Figure 17.2: Get data about your LinkedIn network size through Network Statistics.

Figure 17.3: Get data about your LinkedIn network regional and industry access through Network Statistics.

The Network Statistics feature gives you information about the size and makeup of your extended LinkedIn network and puts into numbers exactly how broad your reach is through that network. For example, you can gather information about the following:

• Number of first-, second-, and third-degree connections

• Number of people you can contact through an introduction

• Number of new people in your network since the previous day

• Number of users you can contact via InMail

• Top regional locations in your network

• Number of locations your connections are in

• Number of additional locations your network gives you access to and a sample of some of those locations

• Fastest-growing locations in your network

• Top industries in your network

• Number of industries your connections are in

• Number of additional industries your network gives you access to and a sample of those industries

• Fastest-growing industries in your network

INSIDER SECRET

The Network Statistics feature gives you a quick way to analyze your network and make sure it’s growing in the right ways to meet your goals. According to your LinkedIn Network Statistics, you can probably reach thousands or millions of people through your network. Use that reach to build your brand, business, and career!