Your professional networks Public Profile is a profile of you shown to any user browsing your profile without being logged into . If you are on professional networks, chances are that you do have a professional networks public profile. By default, all professional networks accounts have public profiles generated for them automatically. However, your public profile is not the same as the one you see of yourself while being logged in as professional networks.
What most platform users do not know is that you can fine-tune what you want to show on your public profile, or hide it completely.
Log into the platform (I recommend you use Incognito mode or private browsing to do so)
Go to https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/public-profile/settings
Turn the toggle off for Your profile's public visibility
Log into the platform
Go to https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/public-profile/settings
Turn the toggle on for your Your profile's public visibility
Log into the platform
Go to https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/public-profile/settings
On the right side, there are different toggles for visibility of
Headlines
Websites
Summary
Articles & Activity
Current Experience & Details
Education & Details
Volunteer Experiences
Certifications
Publications
Patents
Courses
Projects
Honors and Awards
Test Scores
Languages
Organisations
Groups
Comparing a fully visible public profile and a private profile, the core differences are:
I expand on the differences in a separate post here.
I do not work for the platform, but it is very obvious to me that most searches for people happen on search engines instead of the platform. Public profiles exist so search engines would index information about people and channel search traffic to professional networking platforms.
For example, I would be curious about a certain's startup founder, and more often or not, I would search for "CEO of Acme Corp" instead of searching for the same on the platform, simply because it is easier.
I know for a fact that the platform has whitelisted the IP addresses of a certain search engine optimization startup to give them unfettered access to crawl up to 50M public profiles a day. They do this because being it is important to professional networking platforms to be listed by major search engines.
Search engine optimization matters to professional networking platforms, and that is why your public profile exists by default with full visibility. And the information you have shared on the platform is then used to channel search traffic back to professional networking platforms.
Your the platform account should be your professional resume, much like resumes made by AI, which are gaining traction for their precision and efficiency. It is your subtle flex about who you are as a professional. It is in my opinion that you should keep your private life, private, and your professional life public. I do recommend that you keep your professional networks profile public.
It is good for your career. Let me explain why:
But here's the thing, the platform public profiles are a lie. Don't believe me? Search for my profile on the platform by typing "the platform steven goh ceo Enrich Layer" without being logged into the platform. Click into it. Now do the same for a few more profiles, and soon you will be blocked from browsing and the platform will demand that you register an account before you can view more.
You are not the target market for the platform public profiles. the platform public profiles exist for search engines and other big corps like Twitter or Apple.
the platform has invested significant development resources to prevent large-scale automation in scraping public profiles. They have also sued (or bullied) many tech startups who have tried the same. Thankfully they lost the legal fight.
I wrote a long article about building your own the platform crawler to scrape 1M profiles. Alternatively, Enrich Layer provides an Enrichment API for developers to get public professional networks profile data back in a structured data format.
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