Why You Need to Monitor Your Privacy Settings on LinkedIn

Your goal on LinkedIn is to network, right? You want people to find your profile, scan it, and hopefully reach out to you. Or, if you’ve already reached out to them, you want them to accept your connect request. If that’s not happening, LinkedIn isn’t working for you!

When I take on a new client for social media marketing services, one of the first things we do is audit their LinkedIn account. We check the quality of their head shot, their headline, their profile summary, and everything else, including the number and quality of their recommendations. In addition, we also check their privacy settings! Oddly, it’s here that I often find issues.

You can set your privacy settings to narrow or broaden who can see your posts and your profile, and everything in between. Although, I can see times when you would want to restrict who can learn about you (like if you were a rock star with a LinkedIn profile, although I’ve never run across that), most times the broader the better. After all, you want more, not fewer people in your network, right? You not only want to influence your current connections, but you want more connections. And, most of the time, you want your content to not only position you as an industry thought leader, but you want it to gather more followers for you.

You just can’t do that if you’re not maxing out on who can see your stuff!

Another thing we take a look at, and this is more of a real privacy issue, is what apps you’ve allowed to use LinkedIn. Some apps can access your personal data, others can’t. (Think the fiasco with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.) My guess would be that you’d want to delete these apps. At least most of my clients do. Sometimes not, if the app is really useful. Although, they do appreciate knowing when and how their data is being shared.