If you’re a LinkedIn user I’m sure that you are aware of the access you have to analytics for the visitors to your profile. A basic account has statistics on the last 5 users who have viewed your profile and the premium account gives more detailed analytics on visitors to your profile including your appearances in search, the top search keywords for your profile and viewers by industry.

The question is what do you actually do with this information?

Many times it may just be a point of interest, something to note and keep an eye on. However what you may just see as an extra feature of your analytics is being utilised by many LinkedIn users as a way of targeting potential new business leads.

By viewing the profile of a user, they are likely to reciprocate when looking at their own analytics to see that you have viewed theirs. That user then takes a look at your profile to see what type of professional user has been viewing their profile. But what happens after that?

Some users will then request to connect with that person, or join a group that they are in to try and engage or connect. The message may read along the lines of "Saw you checking out my profile, would you like to connect?"

However it was actually that user who instigated the user to look at their profile by looking at theirs first. This is what has now been referred to as ‘LinkedIn flirting’, almost a trigger to instigate an opportunity for engagement on LinkedIn.

The comfort levels at partaking in this activity will vary. Some users would never dream of using this feature to take it this far, however others may see it as a great opportunity.

However whatever your views on the activity it is important to use the analytics to measure the success of your activity on LinkedIn. If nobody has viewed your profile in the last week or two, you may need to review your type and levels of activity on the network. Are you regularly updating your status, contributing to group discussions and commenting on updates from your network?

Let us know what you think of 'LinkedIn flirting'. Is it something you would do or do you see it as too intrusive?