LinkedIn has experienced its share of success and setbacks, praise and criticism, with relatively unwavering support from its millions of users throughout its history. But with a recent $32 million round of funding for the budding professional network Viadeo and a $25 million round for the professional networking Facebook app Branchout, both LinkedIn competitors, what will be the future of the 9-year-old professional network?
Considering recent financial reports and the LinkedIn characteristics that have remained constant since its inception, the company today remains on solid ground. And even though many developers seem to be hopping on the Facebook networking app bandwagon, users haven't been fleeing the stalwart LinkedIn. In Q1 of this year, LinkedIn saw a 60% increase in the number of subscribers and a 139% increase in corporate clients. While Branchout and Viadeo report 25 and 30 million users respectively, LinkedIn still dominates the two competitors with an ever-growing user base of over 150 million.
What's scary for LinkedIn, however, is the speed at which incumbent social networks are growing as competition. It's true that LinkedIn continues to grow steadily, but the progressive user acquisition strategies of LinkedIn's competition, that leverage larger social networks like Facebook and Twitter, allow for more explosive growth.
Branchout and Meeteor are both built on Facebook and leverage their users to make connections. These two apps build your network quickly based on a network you've already made. And Branchout has shown considerable growth recently:
But Branchout hasn't attempted to take the spotlight from LinkedIn without a little bit of bad blood. Last year Branchout's access to LinkedIn's API was revoked after LinkedIn said the startup violated terms of use. Now, Branchout is strictly a Facebook-bound platform.
Although users may be wary of signing up for services through Facebook, these sites allow a more customized networking experience than with LinkedIn. These networks allow you to not only network and search for jobs, but to receive auto-generated recommendations as to who you should meet. LinkedIn, in many ways, has struggled to keep up with the subtle innovations of smaller startups.
At the same time, more and more people seem to be Facebook-centric. In a study by Mashable, 18.4 million people claim they found their current job through Facebook, as opposed to the 10.2 million that used LinkedIn. That statistic is pretty amazing, but keep in mind, the study doesn't give any other information about user demographics.
Still, based on recent fluctuations in usage from a number of Facebook apps, we're beginning to see the dark side of building on Facebook's platform. Apps that call Facebook home are at the will of Facebook's engineers to turn up or down their appearance in users' timelines; if they dial you down, your reach is gone.
Despite gains in unique visitors to Branchout's homepage, their monthly active usage has been on a steady decline:
While some of these statistics seem to be digging away at the foundation of LinkedIn, one of the reasons the network has survived and thrived for so long is that it stands alone for one task: professional networking. In other words, it's only trying to do one thing. And it does it very well, without relying on Facebook's platform.
Also to LinkedIn's favor are the third party sites taking advantage of the network's own massive user base. Sites like Vizualize.me, a visual resume builder, Re.vu, a similar visual resume builder, and Linkedinlabs.com, a beta testing site that uses Linkedin information to create other useful apps, leverage LinkedIn to create new products. These new sites are keeping existing LinkedIn users involved by taking the static resume data that exists on the site and making it dynamic and interactive. That's not to mention the almost 1.5 million users who join new groups on LinkedIn every week; if you're ever wondering how to use LinkedIn for professional networking, get involved in one of the groups.
It's easy to jump on the emerging sites promising to build your network and get you a job, but it's hard to argue against LinkedIn's relevancy when it continues to put up great numbers and continues to produce valuable data for job hunting and professional networking.
This post was written by Daniel Levine, a writer and producer at Grovo.com, a field guide to the Internet with online training for everything from how to use Twitter to Facebook Timeline videos.
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