The Ultimate Guide To Professional Networks Public Profile Visibility

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...

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.

How to change the visibility of your public profile?

To hide your the platform public profile 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

To create a the platform public profile and have it visible

• Log into the platform

• Go to https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/public-profile/settings

• Turn the toggle on for your Your profile's public visibility

Micromanaging visibility of different sections in your profile

• 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

the platform Private Profiles VS the platform Public Profiles

Comparing a fully visible public profile and a private profile, the core differences are:

• Skills are not shown on user profiles.
• Likes and comments on a user's activities are also hidden on a public profile.

I expand on the differences in a separate post here.

Why do public profiles exist?

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.

I believe you should keep your professional networks profile public

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:

• A lot of recruitment and headhunting firms, particularly modern ones such as Hiretual, use public profile data at scale to assist headhunters with sourcing. You are on their list if you keep your professional networks profile public. Conversely, if you turn your profile private, you will limit your availability to recruiters who are partners with the platform).
• Your professional resume can be found on Google. Say you are a software engineer with Google. If someone googles "Ben engineer Google", and assuming your name is Ben, you will be found immediately his is great because now you can be easily found. Conversely, if you do not want do not to be easily found, then turn your profile private.

the platform public profiles are not truly public

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.

How to scrape the platform public profiles at scale?

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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