Nothing burns me more than abuse of a good system and LinkedIn is no exception. Today I found myself on Linked as I do most day for about an hour or so. I check to see who’s viewed my profile and to reach out to new and interesting people. Well I saw in the trends that about 16% of my hits were for social media.
That’s pretty interesting as I love to look at web stats …yeah right! I decided to see who was the number one person for social media on LinkedIn and connect with them. Well after searching for “social media” I learned it was some guy who I won’t name was listed as a Freelance Writer and had social media in his profile an unusual amount of times. Well the unusual amount turned out to be 2943 times the word social media turned up in his profile. That’s right 2943!
Outrageous! As you may or may not know LinkedIn ranks according to relevance and it bases that ranking on your tagline, recent job and past employment. So whatever you have as your chosen field of employment that’s what’s going to show when people search for that keyword. So for the term “St. Louis Social Media” you will notice some very legit people show up for that term.
However if you search for “social media” you will find a first page full of people who have figured this out and have chosen to abuse the system. The person I mentioned by description only may or may not still be there as there are several people taking advantage of this dare I say glitch. It’s more like a legit way that’s being abused.
The problem I have with this is people actually contact me via LinkedIn to conduct business and if they can’t find me because of a few bad apples how many other qualified professionals are missing out do to the unscrupulous tactics of a few. I’ve contacted some people I know at LinkedIn to see if they are aware of the abuse and if they are working on a better way to rank legit users and slap users that opt to try and game the system. I would love to know what you think so please reply below and if you like this post sign up for our updates.
