LinkedIn New Profiles Create “Circles” For You

This week LinkedIn announced “New Profiles” to their 175 million professional users worldwide. The new profiles have been designed to encourage engagement.

The sample profile posted by LinkedIn reveals much more, including circles that represent how people “find” you.

New Profiles Deliver Greater Insight

As social platforms race to aggregate and leverage as much data possible of users to serve advertisers and other revenue streams, users will also benefit from the new interface which includes:

• Bolder interface that makes updates (and sharing) a greater focal point.
• Profile Strength which tells you whether you are an “All Star” , or something else (yet to be revealed), based on how complete your profile is.
• Faces of your Connections are now displayed visually on the profile.
• Endorsements are very visible, demonstrating who thinks you’re good at what skills you possess. Education and Employment history of course are included.
• Linkedin is creating a circle to represent your network and how connections have “found” you, presumably via search or by way of connections with common groups, employers, skill sets, etc. It appears they will be creating ‘circles’ for users based on user relationships and affiliations with connections, or what I call “Spheres of Influence”. This is quite different than Google+ which allows users to create their own circles. What remains to be seen is whether those circles will be click-able to display who is in those circles.

No RSS on New LinkedIn Profiles?

Interestingly, what appears to be absent is the RSS feed for blog posts to feed into profiles. And, it remains to be seen what, if any integration will be made with Company profiles, which also recently went under a bit of a face lift.

The LinkedIn team is clearly busy trying to heighten the level of insight and engagement with the new profile. See what a fully completed profile looks like in the new format.

So, what do you think? Are these changes likely to increase, decrease or not change your use of the platform?