LinkedIn has grown dramatically over the last few years and now has becomes a publishing platform for more than 3 million companies and 225 millions. Not surprisingly, they have added sponsored updates to allow customers to reach new audiences with their posts. Beyond recruitment, LinkedIn offers a compelling opportunity to reach corporate decision makers with plenty of audience segments to target.
LinkedIn has redesigned its mobile apps to improve the activity stream and incorporate sponsored content for more than a quarter of their user base that access the networking site on iPhone and Android. LinkedIn is quickly expanding their offering to build out the news feed and encourage conversations on the platform. Also interesting is the addition of content from key influencers outside your network, which in turn makes paid posts feel more native. For brands wanting to reach decision makers, LinkedIn provides plenty of targeting parameters like job title, industry and company size.
Facebook currently has a stranglehold on the social networking habits of America: two thirds of those online in the US are on Facebook, as compared to only 20% on LinkedIn and 16% on Twitter. But today, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report titled Coming and going on Facebook that highlights a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction spreading through Facebook users.
Based on telephone surveys of 1,006 American adults, Pew found that one in five online adult Americans who do not currently use Facebook said that they have used it in the past, suggesting that they’ve given up on the service. They also found that two-thirds of current Facebook users said that in some time in the past they have taken a voluntary break from the site for several weeks or longer.
The (relative) bad news is that a relatively large proportion of users is evidently finding Facebook time-draining, boring or annoying enough to have given it up for weeks at a time — still, despite a sense of dissatisfaction, these people ended up going back for more. But the most worrying statistic is that 27% of current Facebook users say that, in the future, they plan to spend less time on the site, and just 3% said they want to spend more time there. This is all part
of the population struggling to come to terms with an increasingly social landscape, but these trends will be important to watch for advertisers and tech startups alike.
LinkedIn, boasting 28 million registered users in close to 150 industries, is at last doing things to incorporate community and the exchange of information within its network.
Since its launch in 2003, the professional networking site has served more as an online destination to store business contacts than a community offering value to our working lives. With the highly anticipated introduction of new social features, such as branded groups and custom applications, LinkedIn is trying to change this. At the same time, the company is offering brands a chance to engage with desirable business professionals in unique ways. Continue reading “LinkedIn becomes a community, finally”
