By David Howell - April 14th, 2015
LinkedIn has continued to carve a niche for itself amongst B2B professionals. With their recent purchase of Lynda.com, does this signal a shift in how LinkedIn positions itself in the social space?
Founded in 2003, LinkedIn now boasts 350 million users across 200 countries. As the social network of choice for business professionals, it has become a social network like no other.
- Two new members join LinkedIn every second.
- LinkedIn has 187 million unique visitors each month.
- 40% of LinkedIn users check their profiles daily.
- The average time a user spends on LinkedIn is 17 minutes.
- 70% of LinkedIn users are outside the USA.
- 50,000 long form posts are generated each week.
- 59% of LinkedIn users don’t visit Twitter.
Via: PowerFormula for Linkedin Success
Making connections
Unlike the other leading social media platforms, LinkedIn is different. What began as little more than a specialist people finder has evolved into an essential content tool that businesses are actively leveraging across their commercial activities.
In their last report LinkedIn stated: “At LinkedIn, we are witnessing a revolution. Professional content consumption is dramatically rising—especially on LinkedIn, where over 1.5 million publishers actively use the LinkedIn Share button on their sites to send content into the LinkedIn platform. The LinkedIn members on the forefront of this revolution are leading the way by consuming and sharing professional content in record amounts. We call these folks ‘Content Revolutionaries.’ They are the audience you want to tailor your content for.”
On average, members spend about 1 workday (8 hours per week) consuming professionally relevant content as a way to educate themselves on their industry news and trends. Members are more likely to share professional content that builds their professional brands, strengthens their professional networks, or helps them sell to their networks. Marketing content will be shared more if it fulfils these needs.
Leveraging the power that LinkedIn has means understanding the people and businesses you want to reach. Unlike other social media networks, LinkedIn requires a different approach:
- Take care with the quantity of content posted to LinkedIn. Buzzstream found that 15% of survey respondents would unfollow a brand on LinkedIn if they posted more than six times a day.
- Location-based engagement has diminished in favour of sharable content especially on LinkedIn that sees a massive 200% increase over the past two years.
- 86% of those interviewed said: “When I find a brand I like, I stick with it.”
- 78% said: “I’m typically willing to pay more for high quality items.”
- According to comScore’s 2013 Buying Power Index, LinkedIn members have nearly twice as much buying power than Facebook.
- Members are more than twice as likely to trust information provided on LinkedIn than other social networks, which drives purchases.
- 51% strongly agree that they trust the information from listed publishers on LinkedIn, compared with only 23% from the next highest social network.
On the purchase of Lynda.com LinkedIn CEO and founder Jeff Weiner wrote: “LinkedIn has the members, the jobs, a unique understanding of the skills required to do those jobs, and a publishing platform that can be accessed by roughly 350 million people to share professionally relevant knowledge. lynda.com's service has the premium library of skills-based courses. Together, we can bring opportunities and access to knowledge that everyone deserves. And together, we can more easily build the Economic Graph by mapping together the people, jobs, skills, and knowledge that are core components of it.”
LinkedIn has developed in the premiere network for B2B marketers, and as a professional social network with specific traits that sees it stand apart from other social media networks. The impact that the purchase of Lynda.com will have on the network as a whole remains to be seen. However, moving increasingly LinkedIn towards a future where it becomes an educator as well as a connect and enagement platform could further mark LinkedIn, as the social media network that even more professionals and businesses place at the centre of much of their marketing activity.
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