Increase Flippa Trust Rank – Associate Your LinkedIn Profile
Posted on November 24th, 2009 by Luke Moulton
In an effort to gather more useful user trust information, we’ve just given Flippa users the ability to improve their trust rank by associating their Flippa profile with an existing LinkedIn profile.
As a trusted and widely used professional social media network, we believe LinkedIn profiles and the numbers of connections associated with an individual’s profile, provides a good indicator of trust. If you haven’t been using Flippa for long or haven’t yet been active on the Flippa marketplace, you may be finding it challenging to increase your trust rank. You know you’re an upstanding individual, now you can let the Flippa community know by associating an established LinkedIn profile with your Flippa profile.
How does it work?
When you associate your LinkedIn profile with your Flippa profile, trust rank will increase based on how many connections you have on LinkedIn. For example:
- 0 LinkedIn connections earn you +1 trust points
- 1-14 connections earns you +2 points
- 15+ connections earns you +5 points
If you haven’t been using Flippa for long, it’s a great way to increase your trust rank.
How to Associate Your LinkedIn Profile
It’s easy to associate your LinkedIn profile to Flippa:
- Find the Trust Manager navigation item from your Flippa profile page.
- Scroll down to find the LinkedIn Connect option and click the Connect Now button.
- Confirm that you’d like to grant Flippa access to your LinkedIn profile by filling in your LinkedIn login details.
- That’s It! Your trust rank will have increased depending on the number of LinkedIn connections you have.
Comments (21)
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November 24, 2009 - 8:04 am
This is a great idea…
But, will this show up in my LinkedIn profile? i.e. will my contacts know that I buy and sell websites on Flippa?
The reason I ask is that I have a “professional” day job.
November 24, 2009 - 8:26 am
I was on board with most the changes you’ve made and didn’t even mind the Facebook connection “that” much, but understand why some people were PO’ed.
But, now you’re taking things too far.
Higher trust rating on Flippa.com for the more connections you have on LinkedIn.com? WTF?
What if I don’t want to use LinkedIn? What if I want to use LinkedIn but only connect with 3 people?
What if all 15 of someone’s connections are scammers? Somehow they’re still more “trustworthy” because they “connected with them” on another site that had NOTHING to do with buying/selling websites? lol
Have you actually thought this through?
This is getting stupid. You guys need to use REAL verification like ID, phone, credit cards, feedback on transactions, etc.
Not only is it unfair to sellers who don’t have profiles on other sites, but you’re creating FALSE trust in the eyes of buyers, because the number of connections has NOTHING to do with how someone does business or how trustworthy they are.
Please rethink this one.
Jay
November 24, 2009 - 8:34 am
I wasn’t totally against the Facebook idea but I do see how meaningless it actually is after realising that my Facebook account is as trusted as the newest scammer who joins Flippa and sets up a new Facebook account to get a point. I don’t go around inviting people to be friends on Facebook that aren’t my friends not to mention that most of my friends don’t have a Facebook account so that extra point will only come about when/if I bother to solicit new ‘friends’.
And now LinkedIn?! I thought it was a joke when you guys tweeted this. Do I have a LinkedIn account? No. Why not? Never had a need. What with Facebook, forums, Twitter, Stumble etc….I hardly need a LinkedIn account for my online networking. So what do I do now to ‘keep up’ my trust points? Go and create an account and solicit contacts.
Perhaps I’m the only one without a LinkedIn account but I have someone setting one up for me right now….of course I don’t have to but I’m sure you can appreciate the very fact that you’re trying to get buyers to ‘see’ who they can trust and why…well I need to keep up with their perception of what’s important which Flippa is feeding them!
I’ve been a fan of nearly all your changes, a Flippa advocate in fact, and seeing you take our feedback here and explain Flippa’s position on things has been excellent. Some consultation on this would have been great and who knows, the majority might have agreed it’s for the better.
Sorry if I missed any consultation you did do where you discovered it’s something the majority of your users wanted.
November 24, 2009 - 11:40 am
“Higher trust rating on Flippa.com for the more connections you have on LinkedIn.com? WTF?
What if I don’t want to use LinkedIn? What if I want to use LinkedIn but only connect with 3 people?”
Same here! Why do you KEEP FORCING us to use some other websites? Flippa I liked you and gave you my full support, but this is becoming ridiculous… At this point it’s becoming funny and like child play…
I would also like to bump and support every single word written by Michelle Adams as if I start writing I would write the same and there is no need for it.
Flippa team, don’t get me wrong, but you should listen to your trust worth old-school users who gave you this name…
Most annoying is that you are FORCING us to use those other websites in order to get Flippa trust rating up?
Dear Flippa team this is very very disappointing.
November 24, 2009 - 12:09 pm
Wow, I’m sorry that some people think this is a bad idea!
Let me go through the logic here. I think everyone agrees that identity is a really important concept in a professional marketplace. We want Flippa to be the most professional, trustworthy marketplace possible – we want you to know who you’re dealing with.
However, on the Internet identity is hard to find. Email addresses and phone numbers, for instance, are a dime a dozen – or cheaper!
So in order to allow people to corroborate their identity external to the site, we’re incorporating, step by step, the use of external identity sources. One is Facebook, as you’ve already seen. And now another is LinkedIn.
These are external identity sources which can help to give us some degree of trust, as another part of a full picture of a user. Cross-referencing your Flippa identity to these sources costs you nothing, but it can help to give users more trust in you, as it helps them know that we’re more certain of your identity.
I know that everyone wants to have a trust rating as high as possible, but if you don’t use one of these services, there’s no real need to get an account on them. Your trust rating should be as high as is feasible, but the difference between +10 and +11 is minimal for almost all purposes. There’s no need to start up a new LinkedIn account just to get that extra one point.
We just want to provide options for each person to get their trust rating up to a decent level. If you don’t have a Facebook account, use your LinkedIn account. If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, use your eBay account. (Hopefully we’ll have that in the next month or two.) But don’t feel you have to use all of them.
Maybe the problem here is the way we display trust ratings, so this is definitely something I’ll think about. But I hope our reasoning makes a bit more sense?
November 24, 2009 - 2:50 pm
I agree with the above comments from Jay and Michelle. Just how does a LinkedIn acct make someone trustworthy? I actually have one that I never use. I just went in and accepted 14 connection invitations that have been in my inbox for years. Now I’m trustworthy. Makes no sense at all. I actually know one person who is one of my contacts on LinkedIn.
November 24, 2009 - 5:59 pm
I’m gonna co-sign Jay and Michelle on this one.
Dave, I’ll put this in perspective for you — actually, hold on, I’ll be right back, I have to set Facebook Blaster Pro to run on the new Facebook account that I just created for Flippa. After that, I’ll just randomly adding people on my new LinkedIn account.
See where this can go?
November 24, 2009 - 9:47 pm
“We just want to provide options for each person to get their trust rating up to a decent level.”
Getting a trust rating up to a ‘decent level’ via accounts that can be set up in a few minutes? I don’t follow the logic.
Obviously we all hope that buyers and sellers inspect people’s trust rating and can draw a conclusion that three accounts outside of Flippa and zero feedback is NOT a good indication of trust. That’s less likely to happen though because as you said, you want people to feel confident that Flippa are more certain of the user’s identity so a ‘decent rating’ could easily be taken on face value. The fact that trust is awarded based on weak accounts is not something a lot of users will realise, they trust you guys are awarding points on solid factors.
The extra level of certainity Flippa has of my identity by me linking these accounts would surely be neglible? Yet the amount of points you’re awarding against these ‘friend’s counts’ is mind blowing. You talk as though they don’t mean much on one hand yet award 5 points for having 15 contacts on LinkedIn?
There have been discussions around address verification, poweruser badges etc yet it looks like Flippa’s focus is on building commercial relationships with ebay, LinkedIn, Facebook and….
Any seller or buyer who has any of these accounts gets zero extra trustworthiness scores in my mind. They have friends on Facebook, friends on LinkedIn and an ebay account, so what? Setting these accounts up is as simple as 123.
The reasoning you’ve shared does not make more sense to me at all.
November 25, 2009 - 2:58 am
Wow! Now I’ve heard it all. And I mean…all. lol. It is way to easy to create an account on LinkedIn, and add a bunch of peeps. Anyone can do it. And fast.
This can’t possibly be used as a trustworthy measure. Think of something else, guys.
I personally look at FEEDBACK when dealing with buyers and their history on Flippa. These two measures certainly have way more impact than having 15 friends on LinkedIn.
Wait! On second thought, I just shot up in the ratings, so disregard all of the above. lol.
November 26, 2009 - 2:25 am
The more I think about this, the more I realize this has nothing to do with trust rating.
It’s Flippa thinking you’ll bring in traffic from these external, so called “friends (buyers)” into the marketplace here. More traffic, more buyers, more sellers, more fee’s.
This has nothing to do with TRUST. It’s marketing. Just call it what it is, please don’t insult us.
You are giving us up to 5 trust factor points for some linkedin account?
So some new bozo, scammer seller can increase their trust factor by false means, and have a trust factor that counts more as Feedback?
This is insane.
November 28, 2009 - 3:32 pm
Oh well, I already joined them.
December 1, 2009 - 7:52 am
OK, Flippa don’t you get it? Read the comment above by JD!
HE IS RIGHT!
There are sellers who just joined 10 days ago who have higher ratings than people who have been here 3 years! And all the new people did was create a facebook account and add friends. Same with the linkedin. And you want me to TRUST the new people?
Positive feedback from previous transactions is what makes people trustworthy. Not a social media account.
Your logic is clearly out of sync with the professional business world.
December 4, 2009 - 12:06 pm
I agree with JD and everyone else here. Bad idea.
You don’t see ebay rating sellers based on their 3rd party social networking accounts. It’s called feedback and its worked on ebay for years. Why can’t it be so simple at Flippa?
February 19, 2011 - 5:42 pm
I just increased my Trust Rating +5 by re-uploading my LinkedIn profile after reading this. Thanks
May 10, 2011 - 12:10 am
Dunno if comments are still being monitored but a few suggestions:
1) Create the functionality for each user to setup a personal trust filter with tick boxes to allow people to say whether or not a particular criterium should be included in their view of another user’s trust. The if people don’t want to trust linkedin status, this doesn’t appear in their view of the flippa world.
2) Add credit card trust – I just paid a fee to flippa with my credit card but I don’t get any additional trust for that, even though it is a much better indicator that I am who I say I am than the telephone number verification
3) Increase the linkedin connections thresholds. 15 is just way too low for a +5 and easily facilitates faking connections as people have suggested in earlier comments. I have over 300 _genuine_ connections that have taken _years_ to build up. It would be a lot more difficult to fake 100+ connections – a little collaboration between flippa and linkedin could soon show suspicious connectivity on linkedin.
November 24, 2009 - 4:57 pm
Ditto to everything he already said, especially…WTF?
These networks have NOTHING TO DO WITH TRUST RATING!
Cut out the crap.
November 24, 2009 - 5:07 pm
“Maybe the problem here is the way we display trust ratings, so this is definitely something I’ll think about.”
Yes, think about it real hard and fast please. Why should a profile show:
They don’t have a Facebook account
They don’t have a LinkedIn account
Soon to be eBay. I’m not linking my eBay account here either.
I hope BUYERS are reading this and know that FEEDBACK is key and the only #1 factor you really need to worry about.
November 24, 2009 - 6:54 pm
Dave – “There’s no need to start up a new LinkedIn account just to get that extra one point.”
Isn’t it potentially 5 POINTS?
If another seller uses LinkedIn with “15 connections”, they get 5 points, correct?
So, that’s a big difference if a another seller has 15 and I have 10 because they have more friends on a different site that has nothing at all to do with buying/selling.
Also, judging by the comments you’ve made…
ones like “don’t feel you have to use all of them”…
I don’t think you understand what the trust rating means to sellers. We all want the highest possible trust rating. Buyers will look at the trust rating and compare sellers, but I highly doubt the majority of them will actually look into all the different ways sellers can get “trust points”.
I worked really hard to build the trust / customer base I have right now (on/off Flippa).
It doesn’t seem fair to have other sellers get a higher trust rating because they have accounts on OTHER SITES – especially more points for more friends – that one really bugs me (maybe cause I have no friends. lol)
I’m not being sarcastic here, but it’s starting to feel a little like a “game” to get the most trust points, when, IMO, it should be based on ID verification and how I do BUSINESS on Flippa.com.
…and now eBay too? Maybe you should just do what eBay does instead. Could you imagine if eBay asked me to verify my Flippa account for a higher trust rating?? lol
November 24, 2009 - 10:00 pm
Well, the problem with not using it is that it would put us at a disadvantage to those who are using it. I’m not sure why you think that adding a LinkedIn profile to Flippa implies trust, but there is no verification on LinkedIn that you are who you say you are and there is no trust implied from having 15 total strangers as your contacts. I know that, you should know that and everyone else does know that.
It is a completely fake measure of trust and it isn’t just for 1 point … it’s for 5. It’s very easy to get 15 total strangers to connect with you. I just did it today. You should put your efforts into meaningful and robust features rather than a bunch of fluff that is completely fake.
November 27, 2009 - 9:25 pm
There are new sellers that have been here about a month, who now have a higher trust factor than than sellers who have been here for over a YEAR or TWO with excellent Feedback.
These accounts are Social Network factors, not Trust factors. You know there’s a difference, so why can’t you just separate the two?
November 24, 2009 - 10:07 pm
I just read the Ebay thing. Unbelievable that you are considering yet another meaningless trust measure rather than doing something REAL like verifying addresses. Who really gives a crap whether or not you have an Ebay account? This is just getting ridiculous.
Trust should be verified by real measures … phone, address, how satisfied your Flippa customers are.