Can You Generate Leads by Viewing LinkedIn Profiles?
There are as many opinions about how to generate leads on LinkedIn as there are LinkedIn experts.
The Theory:
One strategy that is often recommended is the practice of viewing profiles of potential clients. The theory is that once someone sees you’ve viewed their profile, they will be curious to view yours. That interaction opens the door to a conversation, which might turn into a lead.
Why would this work? After the homepage, the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” page is the most popular destination on LinkedIn. People are very interested to know who is viewing their profile – whether it’s clients, colleagues or strangers.
But, does viewing profiles actually generate leads? We decided to test it out.
The Test: LinkBoost
Recently, we had the opportunity to try a new software package from Wexler Consulting called LinkBoost. The tool, an automated profile viewer, seeks out and “views” a pre-determined number of LinkedIn profiles based on your advanced search criteria.
For the test, we used the profile of Nancy Maynard, our business development executive. One of our target markets is sales executives, so we decided to use LinkBoost to view profiles belonging to VPs of Sales.
Over a two-week period, we had LinkBoost view 400 profiles each day.
Of course, you can also manually click through and view each profile for about 10 seconds – the amount of time it takes LinkedIn to register it as an official view. We ran a test to see how long that would take by comparison, and discovered that it took about 1.5 hours to view that many profiles manually – it was a little mind-numbing!
LinkBoost runs in the background while you do other things, making it a much more efficient way to generate profile views.
The Results: It Works!
As a benchmark, in the two-week period before we launched the software, Nancy’s profile received 31 views. She made 13 new connections and created 3 leads.
During the two-week LinkBoost trial, Nancy’s profile received more than 5 times the number of views from the previous period. She increased her connections by 64, and was able to convert 12 of those new connections to leads.
Zeev Wexler
Zeev Wexler, CEO of Wexler Consulting, pointed out, “LinkedIn users can boost their capacity for viewing profiles by using an automated tool like LinkBoost. Using it consistently can bring in a steady stream of leads to increase the opportunity to make connections, build trust and create relationships online.”
Our Take: Try It!
It’s clear that whether you choose to use a software like LinkBoost, or click through manually, viewing profiles leads to more connections and generates more leads. We recommend you view the profiles of executives you’d like to have as clients to start using that strategy.
One caveat… For profile viewing to really work, your own profile needs to be worth checking out. Otherwise, you’re just driving traffic to a dead end. Read my tips for how to invest in your profile to boost the results you get from it.
Try viewing profiles and let us know if it leads to new business!