The Ultimate Guide To Professional Social Network Public Profile Visibility

Steven Goh | CEO -

Your Professional Social Network Public Profile is a profile of you shown to any user browsing your profile without being logged into . If you are on Professional Social Network, chances are that you do have a Professional Social Network public profile. By default, all Professional Social Network 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 Social Network.

What most Professional Social Network 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?

Toggle your profile visibility on or off.

To hide your Professional Social Network public profile completely

  1. Log into Professional Social Network (I recommend you use Incognito mode or private browsing to do so)
  2. Go to https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/public-profile/settings
  3. Turn the toggle off for Your profile's public visibility

To create a Professional Social Network public profile and have it visible

  1. Log into Professional Social Network
  2. Go to https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/public-profile/settings
  3. Turn the toggle on for your Your profile's public visibility

Micromanaging visibility of different sections in your profile

  1. Log into Professional Social Network
  2. Go to https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/public-profile/settings
  3. 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

Professional Social Network Private Profiles VS Professional Social Network Public Profiles

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

  • Skills are not shown on Professional Social Network 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 Professional Social Network, but it is very obvious to me that most searches for people happen on search engines instead of Professional Social Network. Public profiles exist so search engines would index information about people and channel search traffic to Professional Social Network.

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 Professional Social Network, simply because it is easier.

I know for a fact that Professional Social Network 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 Social Network to be listed by major search engines.

Search engine optimization matters to Professional Social Network, and that is why your public profile exists by default with full visibility. And the information you have shared on Professional Social Network is then used to channel search traffic back to Professional Social Network.

I believe you should keep your Professional Social Network profile public

Your Professional Social Network 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 Social Network profile public.

It is good for your career. Let me explain why:

  1. 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 Social Network profile public. Conversely, if you turn your profile private, you will limit your availability to recruiters who are partners with Professional Social Network).
  2. 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! This 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.

Professional Social Network public profiles are not truly public

But here's the thing, Professional Social Network public profiles are a lie. Don't believe me? Search for my profile on Professional Social Network by typing "Professional Social Network steven goh ceo nubela" without being logged into Professional Social Network. Click into it. Now do the same for a few more profiles, and soon you will be blocked from browsing and Professional Social Network will demand that you register an account before you can view more.

You are not the target market for Professional Social Network public profiles. Professional Social Network public profiles exist for search engines and other big corps like Twitter or Apple.

Professional Social Network 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 Professional Social Network public profiles at scale?

I wrote a long article about building your own Professional Social Network crawler to scrape 1M profiles. Alternatively, Proxycurl provides an Enrichment API for developers to get public Professional Social Network profile data back in a structured data format.

And if you love reading anecdotes as to how we are solving business problems with our data tools, click here to subscribe to our email list :)