LinkedIn — a fabulous tool for upwardly mobile professionals — is emailing select people to tell them they’re among the top viewed LinkedIn profiles.

Who cares?

When it comes to inbound marketing, What matters is whether the people who need to find people with your skills are seeing your profile.   You might call these the “right” people.  It doesn’t matter how many total people are seeing your profile–what matters is whether the right people are!

Are you in marketing automation?  Did someone in home construction look at your profile?  Congratulations, you’re likely to get comparatively limited benefit from that, if any at all!  It’s like padding your Facebook friends or your Twitter followers–it’s simply a number.

What does matter?

Show me how many targeted hits I’m getting.  What raw number or percentage of those people searching for “marketing automation” saw my profile?  Now I’m interested.  These are people who might be able to get me a job, who I might learn something from, or who I might start a business with.

How do you improve the number of the right people who are seeing your profile?  Make sure you’re using the terms they’re searching for.  Be a resource they will value.  Talk about topics those people care about.  Update your feed regularly, fill out your skills, post slide decks, anything you can to increase your profile’s relevance to your selected topic.

Certainly your LinkedIn profile needs to get hits.  But whether you’re in the top 10% is relevant to no-one.  What matters is if the people that matter are finding you.

TL; DR: Raw numbers don’t matter.  Are the right people seeing your profile?

Image from LinkedIn