If you’ve ever Googled your own name, you may have noticedthat there are a lot of places where people can find information about youonline. These sources include Google itself, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, andmore.
How do you find out who’s looking for you online? Luckily,most of those resources have monitoring services you can use to get alertswhenever someone searches for your name.
Table of Contents
The following are very simple things you can do to set upalerts or otherwise monitor when people look up your name using the internet.
LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Alerts, Google Analytics (on asite with your name/domain), Facebook Stories, Facebook friend list algorithm
1. LinkedIn Profile Views
People can search for your name from inside LinkedIn, or they can discover your profile using Google and access your public profile information that way.
LinkedIn gives members an easy way to see who viewed yourprofile.
To see this information, log into your LinkedIn account.Under your profile name on the left side of the screen, you’ll see a link namedWho’s viewed your profile.
To the right of the link, you can see how many people haverecently viewed your profile. To see more details, click on the link.
Scroll down to the All profile viewers section. Hereyou’ll see some details about who recently viewed your LinkedIn Account.
This information includes:
- Name
- What company they work for
- How they found your profile
- Which of your LinkedIn connections are alsoconnected with that person
- How long ago they viewed your profile
Unfortunately, you can’t see the entire list ofpeople who’ve viewed your profile without purchasing a Premium LinkedInmembership.
If you do need to know who’s viewing your LinkedIn profile, that premium membership may be worth it.
2. Create Google Alerts for Your Name
The most common tool peoplewill use to look for information about you on the internet is Google. While youmay not be able to monitor who’s searching for your name using Google, you canmonitor when new information is published with your name on the internet.
To create an alert for when anything gets published mentioning your name, visit Google Alerts.
Make sure you’re already logged into your Google Account. In the Create an alert about field, type your name and select Create Alert.
Whenever you add anything to your Google Alert list or any time Google has a new search entry for a website that contains your name, you’ll receive an email for that google alert. This email will include links to the websites that have mentioned your name.
You’ll notice that the bottomof the email, you can click a link to receive the alerts as an RSS feed. Thiswould let you add the feed to any kind of feed reader you may use.
3. Facebook Story Viewers
One of the most commonrequests Facebook users have is to see who viewed their Facebook profile.Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that. However, there are areas of Facebookwhere you can see the people who’ve visited.
If you make a regularFacebook post, the only way to know who viewed your post is how many peoplehave “liked” the post itself. There’s now way to actually see every one of yourfriends who looked at it.
However, that’s not the casewhen you add to your Facebook Stories. If you select the field to enter aFacebook post, you’ll notice that you can switch the post from News Feedto Your Story.
You can post up to 20 secondsof video (or an image) to your Facebook Story. The post will remain active for24 hours before disappearing.
Once you post to your Story,you’ll notice an eye icon show up in the lower left corner of the post with anumber next to it. The number represents the number of your friends who’veviewed the post. If you click on the eyeball icon, you can see your specificfriends who’ve viewed the post.
If you view your Facebooknews feed, to the right you can see a link to Your Story. To the left of this,you’ll see your profile photo with a + symbol. If you click this, youcan view all your recent story posts, and which of your friends have viewedthose posts.
It’s unfortunate thatFacebook doesn’t offer this feature for regular posts, but at least when youpost to your Story list, you can see all of your friends who’ve viewed thepost.
4. Facebook Friends Algorithm
While it isn’t possible to see a list of friends who’veviewed your specific Facebook posts, there is an indirect way to see whichfriends have been interacting the most with your Facebook profile.
No one really knows the specific details of Facebook’s algorithm for the order they display the friends in your friends’ list.
But there has been enough research conducted to know thatthe all the following factors are considered.
- Facebook Interactions: How frequentlyyou’ve interacted with those friends on Facebook.
- Profile Views: How frequently thosefriends have viewed your profile, or you viewed theirs.
- Photo Tagging: Friends that have taggedyou in photos.
- Wall Posts: Friends who’ve postedrecently on your wall.
- Likes: How often friends have liked your posts,or you’ve liked theirs.
- Commenting: Frequency you or friends havecommented on each other’s posts or pictures.
- Photos: How often you’ve viewed eachother’s pictures.
- Online: If friends are currently online,they’re more likely to show up at the top of your friends list.
Since the most common activity on Facebook is viewingfriends’ profiles and posts without interacting with them, the odds are goodthat the friends at the top of your friends list are the friends who’ve beenviewing your profile and your posts most frequently.
5. Twitter Viewers
Twitter provides a bit more information about your Twitterfollowers than Facebook does, but still doesn’t provide the names of the peoplewho are looking for you there.
However, you can learn a lot about the people who areinteracting with your Tweets.
To see your audience information, you’ll need to use TwitterAnalytics. You can access this by clicking the down arrow beside your profilename and selecting Analytics.
This page will show you who your top follower is, and thegeneral performance of all your tweets.
You can click the View followers dashboard to view generaldetails about your Twitter audience.
You can see demographics like gender, household income, andinterests of your followers. This may not tell you the names of people lookingfor you on Twitter, but it at least tells you their interests so you can tailorthe topics you tweet about for your followers.
6. Create a Profile Site with Google Analytics
Thanks to blogging platforms like WordPress of Google Sites, it’s very easy to build your own profile website filled with information about your background and experience. A profile website is a fantastic way to easily share your background and career experience with potential employers.
In time it’ll also become a top search result when peoplesearch for your name if you’ve purchased a website domain for your name.
This will become a likely website most people will click onwhen they’re looking for you online.
If you embed Google Analytics into this site, you can gathera lot of information about the people who are looking for information about youon the web.
Google Analytics may not provide the names of the people whovisit your site, but you can learn just about anything else. For example,Google Analytics will provide:
- Age
- Gender
- Country
- Interests
- Frequency of visits
- Search terms used
This information can give you some insight into the type ofpeople who are searching for you online. If you’re a writer or in any otherbusiness where you provide information to people, this information can help youtailor your work toward the demographics of the people who are looking for yourwork.
Who’sLooking for You?
As you can see, LinkedIn and other social media sites arethe best ways to see specifically who’s searching for you online. But GoogleAlerts and your site can provide even more insights as well. Which approach youtake depends on what kind of information about those people you want to know.
