James Potter — February 12, 2019 — February 12, 2019
Whilst you can see your own picture when you look at your own profile not everyone else can necessarily. I’ve recently spotted quite a few profiles where you cannot see the photograph until you have connected to them, but with that comes a problem.
If you have that profile, then a casual viewer will most likely assume you have no photograph (as they cannot see it) and make assumptions about you and your profile (you are 21 times less likely to be viewed according to LinkedIn’s own research). You can easily be perceived as not serious or professional according to our research and neither of these might in fact be true so it might be time to check those settings.
The functions to manage who can see your profile were designed for people that are being stalked or don’t want their image to appear online like spies, secretive people and more (and yes they are on LinkedIn – we’ve trained them), but in most cases people want to be seen, to look like they look and imbue trust at the outset.
To check and or change the visibility of your profile photo:
1. Click on the ‘Me’ icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage on the desktop or laptop, top right-hand side.
2. Then click View profile.
3. Click directly on your profile photo to get the pop up below.
4. Near the bottom right of the pop-up window, click ‘Visibility’
5. Select the visibility for who can see your profile photo from the following options:
• Your connections – Just your 1st level connections i.e. those you have invites or accepted the invites from.
• Your network – 1st, 2nd and 3rd level connections.
• All LinkedIn members – Any of the members on LinkedIn
• Public – Anyone inside LinkedIn or when they look at your public profile outside of LinkedIn through a web browser and more.
6. Click Apply to save the changes and it is done.
If you were going to ask me for my suggestion I would go with ‘Public’ if you have a public facing role or will be looked at by the public, or just LinkedIn members if you want to keep more private.
I’ve written quite a lot on the importance of a good profile picture and shared some funny (yet sadly true!) profile images that I never want to see on LinkedIn ever again, but sometimes people have inadvertently hampered themselves by inadvertently hiding their photograph.
That public face, a bit like meeting you in public, is still as important as ever and well worth just checking you are set up as you should be.
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