If you’re like me, you burn to know how popular you are on LinkedIn and how you match up, popularity-wise, against your peers. Actually I’ve never wondered this, but LinkedIn seems to want me to now.
The professional social networking site has launched a new feature called How You Rank; it’s presented as an additional tab on the “Who’s viewed your profile” page. There, you’ll see how many times your profile page has been viewed, and a ranking. For instance, mine tells me that I rank 85th in page views among the 306 people in my network, or in the top 28th percentile.
Pretty good, right? Not good enough, says LinkedIn. The whole right side of the page is filled with inspirational (LinkedIn’s word) ideas for generating more page views and pushing up my ranking. I’m advised to make more posts, join more groups, update my profile, etc.
Screen shot of LinkedIn's new How You Rank page.
Above: Screen shot of LinkedIn’s new How You Rank page.
Image Credit: LinkedIn
The left side of the page shows the master ranking of the most viewed people in your network. The real movers and shakers! If this doesn’t make you burn with envy, LinkedIn ratchets it up a notch by displaying the ranking of the people in your company who have the most views. Dave the sales manager has more page views than me?!? Game on.
It feels like LinkedIn is trying to inject a little competition into networking experience. Is the service getting gamified? Do I get a badge if I win? Well, no.
The real point of How You Rank is apparently to generate more interest around the Who Viewed Me page. LinkedIn will tell you a few of the people who have viewed your profile, but then tries to temp you to buy a Premium account to view the whole list.
At any rate, the new How You Rank feature will roll out to all English speaking users by end of day Wednesday, a LinkedIn spokeswoman told me.
I don’t think I’ll ever be the most popular person in my network. I’ll have to live with that. Is “most congenial” still available?