Have you ever dreamed of being the most popular on social media? I sure did, True story.

Thank you for taking just two minutes of your day to read this informative, yet very funny story.  This is an account of my unofficial LinkedIn experiment, that I conducted about one year ago in my quest to become Mr. Popular. 

When I first started building my world class LinkedIn network, I quickly found out, that if you are active on LinkedIn, you can achieve great success.  You can move up the most popular index on LinkedIn very quickly.  For those of you who may not know, LinkedIn has a feature that let's you know how you rank among your peers.  Either by percentile ranking, or by a list they accumulate based on profile views. 

When I had around 3,200 connections and maxed out all 50 skill sets 99 plus, I thought I was doing very well.  In fact, I was in the Top 1% of my 1st level connections, but I only ranked #52 out of all my connections.  My lofty goal was to get into the TOP 10 list of 1st level connections.    

After about six months had gone by, I realized that my dream of being Mr. Popular was not going very well.  Even though, I was being very active on LinkedIn and making a lot of very prominent connections, I was not fulfilling my dream of being Mr. Popular.  I was now ranked 125 out of all my connections.  Even though I had a lot more connections than 3,200, my ranking among peers was going in the wrong direction.  I was going down, not up.   

So I quickly realized, when I read updates by members bragging about how many profile views they were getting, this must be the secret formula to being popular on LinkedIn.  I remember some members stating, that they had 22,000 profile views in the last 90 days, but only made 12 connections in the last week.  I thought to myself WOW, I am not doing all that bad.  I had 2,700 profile views in the last 90 days, and made 72 connections in the last week.  

Forgive me if I am wrong, but I thought LinkedIn was about building relationships and making real connections.  So, when I looked at these numbers and made my comparison, it made more sense to have a better connection rate, than have an inflated number of profile views.  

But guess what, I still had a bruised ego and my feelings were hurt.  Buuhuu :)

Why, because I had not fulfilled my dream.  So. like they say, "desperate times require desperate measures."    

In order for me to accomplish my goal, I would have to be very clever and devise a plan to get more profile views.  After observing the Top 10 list for many month's, I realized that the majority of members in the Top 10 were, more often than not were  "beautiful women."  I had a plan.  A very clever plan.  

I wrote a message to my good friend Jim Cody and told him, I was going to conduct an unofficial LinkedIn experiment, and change my profile picture to a beautiful woman.  My guess was, that I would become super popular really fast. This was not the exact picture I changed to, but something to that effect..

Ohh my, do I have your full attention know.  Can someone say, Ohh Yes :)

Just kidding, please do not report this to the LinkedIn Police.  This is a true story and an actual depiction of a real Unofficial LinkedIn experiment, that I conducted last year.  

My results were amazing.  I remember after posting a profile picture like this, I started getting over 200 profile views an hour.  Mostly from men who just wanted to admire my "new beauty." I remember receiving so many profile views, that I almost broke the LinkedIn counting system.

I was getting around 1,500 profile views a day.  Out of all of these profile views, my connection rate took a significant drop, as you can imaging.  I quickly started moving up the ranks.  Before long, after changing my profile picture to about five different women over a 3 week period, I quickly made it to #19 on the list.  I had moved up the list from 125 to #19 in just one month.  I almost made it to Top 10.  I eventually made over 26,000 profile views in the last 90 day report.   

Now unfortunately, I had to abort the unofficial LinkedIn experiment, because I was getting closer to the 30,000 maximum number of connections, and I did not want to be reported to the LinkedIn police.  Did I make it?

No, I did not.  When I got closer to making my 30k connections, LinkedIn asked me to verify my original profile picture on record to verify my existence.  

Lesson learned from this unofficial LinkedIn experiment.  

Yes, it worked. My hypothesis was correct.  Beautiful women, tend to get way more profile views, than us men.  Sorry fellows.  Now, do I recommend you try this at home?  Absolutely not, it is not worth the trouble it may cause.

Now, the real question to you is this.  Should LinkedIn change how they rank members among peers?  Should there be a way, to evaluate how professional one is, based on different criteria, or should LinkedIn maintain the status quo "Profile Views only?"  

About the author:

Bill Brinkle, is known on LinkedIn as The Global Uniter.  Bill is the only LinkedIn expert to have built a 30k world class LinkedIn network, in less than one year, then write an e-book to teach other members his comprehensive connection strategy.  

For more information about his remarkable one of a kind e-book, please visit his official website listed below:

www.theglobaluniter.com