Tag Archive | "linked"

LinkedIn, On The Lookout For More Stickiness, Adds Curated Content Channels On LinkedIn Today

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LinkedIn, now at 225 million users, continues to introduce more features to its site to keep people returning to the it and staying there for longer. Today it’s the turn of LinkedIn Today, its social news page, which is getting a new feature called Channels. The feature is rolling out starting today to English-speaking users. LinkedIn says that it plans to announce the service formally on Wednesday.

Channels bring together curated content around general subjects like technology, marketing strategies, retail and healthcare — 20 in all, with more getting added soon — with each one combining popular posts from news sources with those from selected influencers in the given topic.

Channels will be replacing “industries,” a feature that has been around since LinkedIn first launched LinkedIn Today in 2011. Industries were both more specific in terms of what they covered, and also more geared at news that was trending on the site, and specifically among your contacts.

Channels, on the other hand, attempts to be more interdisciplinary, making use of the idea that there will be people interested in “social media” who are not social media professionals. It also gives some more mileage to the list of 250+ influencers that LinkedIn introduced in October 2012, with their posts also getting rolled into the news mix. It looks like over time, this could also include added multimedia such as presentations using SlideShare and more.

“We believe Channels better represents the content and topical conversations professionals are discussing and sharing on LinkedIn, which go beyond specific industries,” said spokesperson Julie Inouye. “Topics like Entrepreneurship and Your Career are applicable to more than just one industry.”

Last week’s quarterly earnings showed LinkedIn still beating sales targets and earnings estimates, but the company’s stock still took a hit on evidence that revenue growth is slowing down. In that sense, the move to enhance LinkedIn today is more about improving the time its audience spends on the site, and the subsequent knock-on positive effect this could have on advertising, rather than as a direct route to revenue itself.

“Our influencers are not compensated to share their unique insights on LinkedIn and we do not have plans at this time to monetize our Channels pages or our Influencer platform,” Inouye said.

In the last several months LinkedIn has introduced a number of changes. They’ve included upgraded, more media-enhanced profiles; a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical. As with many of these other enhancements, LinkedIn Today, and its new channels feature, offer a more slick look and more functionality.

Product manager Kevin Gu notes that among the new features that will come along with the new channels will be the ability to see the updates from channels on your own homepage stream; the ability to sort content either by most recent news or most popular features; and a look at the top influencer posts on a given day. On top of this, users will also see channels making their way to their LinkedIn email digests, which will now include influencer posts, trending professional news as well as Slideshare content.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn Raises Your Profile, Now Lets You Add Photos, Videos, PowerPoints And Comments From Others

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LinkedIn today announced another upgrade to its site, part of a bigger plan to add more features and reasons for people to hang around on its pages for longer: this time it’s the turn of profile pages, where users will now be able to add more images, videos, resumes, presentations and comments and likes from other users as part of the mix. While the site continues to add more features to make itself more “social,” profile sharing — that is, the ability to send over a link to someone to be able to view your profile, and then sharing certain aspects of it, such as a resume or presentation — will not be coming today, but a spokesperson says that this will be available soon.

The feature is being turned on across the whole of the LinkedIn network starting from today.

This will be a useful way for LinkedIn to continue to further its reputation as the go-to place for people looking for jobs, and for professional networking.

But it will also help pretty up the general experience. Up to now, regardless of what your profession or job is, every LinkedIn profile looked exactly the same as the other. Now, the idea is that if you’re an architect, you can expand your profile with more dynamic pictures of buildings you’ve designed; or if you’re a tech analyst, you can include links to some of your recent research. No two job seekers are alike.

This also means that LinkedIn is introducing one more way that it might, potentially, monetize the site. Although today’s profile features are all free of charge, you can see how, for example, LinkedIn might put a premium on extra services (like Sharing, only “coming soon”), or more storage space — for example to hold more content on your profile page.

This also gives LinkedIn an interesting entry into both the area of companies looking to “own” the online profile space, such as About.me and Flavors.me, as well as GetHired, Grouptalent, HireArt, BraveNewTalent, and ResumUp.

Today’s news comes on the heels of a number of updates at LinkedIn — all also made to improve the user experience and usefulness of the platform. They include a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn Turns Its Contacts Section Into A Personal Assistant, With Google, Yahoo, Evernote & Outlook Apps Integration And A Standalone iPhone App

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Make way for another major update to the LinkedIn platform: today the company is relaunching its Contacts section as a smart contact management system that will let users link up and integrate connections on LinkedIn with those from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft apps; Evernote; TripIt; your iPhone and more, and then serve as a “personal assistant” to help manage the interactions you make with them.

Along with this, LinkedIn is launching a Contacts app for the iPhone — its third standalone app in addition to LinkedIn itself and business card scanner CardMunch, and the first time that LinkedIn has broken out one feature of its platform in its own app. Sachin Rekhi, the creator of Contacts, says that access to the new Contacts will come in stages: first to a limited number of users in the U.S., then to the rest of the country, and then to the rest of LinkedIn’s user base worldwide.

The iPhone app, meanwhile, will be free to download and use with no specific plans for monetizing at the moment. As a point of comparison, the company’s new iPhone and Android apps, introduced last week, are now running a limited number of mobile ads.

Contacts is the first big product to come out of LinkedIn’s October 2011 acquisition of Connected, the smart contacts management platform it bought to “revolutionize contact management” on LinkedIn. Rekhi, the product lead for Contacts, was one of the co-founders of Connected.

The main idea behind it is to help LinkedIn become more of a platform for managing and interacting with people you know through work. In turn, this will (LinkedIn hopes) increase the amount of time that users spend on LinkedIn as a whole. While some of LinkedIn’s recent updates — for example, the new Recruiter pages — may be aimed more at “power users” (and paying users) of the platform, Contacts has a more universal feel to it. We all face the same problems: we connect with people in different ways online, and this is an offering to manage that in a better and smarter way.

This comes through a number of feature updates:

Whereas in the old version of Contacts, LinkedIn allowed for one-off imports from services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook and others, what users can do now is integrate those contacts as live links, so when something changes on any of those third party accounts, the info gets updated in LinkedIn.

The full list of services that can be integrated include Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar; Google Apps Mail, Contacts, Calendar; Yahoo! Mail, Contacts, Calendar; Outlook Mail, Contacts, Calendar; iPhone Address Book (via the LinkedIn Contacts app); LinkedIn’s CardMunch service; Evernote and TripIt. Outlook Contacts CSV, Mac Address Book vCard and Yahoo! Contacts CSV are all supported as one-off contact imports. Here’s how it looks when you’ve started to import contacts:

When you link up any of the above, LinkedIn automatically finds and adds the new contact details to any pre-existing names in your contact list. The different sources then appear as icons next to each name:

That list, in turn, can now be organised in different ways, using a tab in the upper right corner, with different views including by recent conversations (and its communications opposite, by those with whom we’ve lost touch).  You can also view by those you’ve most recently added, alphabetical, company, and location. The last of these is about organizing users around what cities they are based in, but you can see how this might potentially get used in LinkedIn’s mobile app also to include a location-based feature and sort by people who are nearby — something that could be useful particularly at business events, for example.

Within each contact, you also now have an expanded relationship view that integrates all of the interactions you’ve had with a particular person over the different networks that have been integrated, along with any reminders that you have set yourself to connect in the future. This is a pretty nifty feature in that it doesn’t require manual updates for past events; instead it automatically aggregates whatever has happened already into a timeline of events:

Drawing back out into the wider Contacts interface, LinkedIn is making the interface more visually appealing, similar to the rest of its product refreshes. Here, this comes in the form of a photo carousel of your contacts, which runs across the top of the Contacts page and includes reminders for different tasks. Those reminders, in turn, automatically direct you to other tasks: for example, in the meeting reminder below, the “plan a meeting” button automatically goes to a screen where the user can send an email using whatever network the contact exists on (eg Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, etc.)

What the emphasis on third-party networks means, too, is that the new Contacts feature will also include the ability to integrate and tag people who are not in your LinkedIn networks but that you would potentially like to add at some point in the future; and of course you can also delete those that you do not want to add.

Gmail, for example, creates a contact out of everyone who has emailed you, but you may not actually want all those people in your larger Contacts network. Rekhi points out that even if they are imported, LinkedIn sorts “intelligently” and will pick up if you’re not actually interacting with people on a regular basis and subsequently rank them lower in non-alphabetical list views. “We apply an algorithm on top of that list [which asks] is that person interesting to you?” he explained.

The new Contacts service comes on the heels of a number of other new products that LinkedIn has been rolling out to widen out the usefulness of its site and make it a place where people will visit more often and for longer.

In addition to the new iPhone and Android apps, LinkedIn had a major website overhaul last year; launched a new search engine; introduced status update mentions and Klout-style endorsements; and it is also expanding its premium offerings, such as its Recruiter homepage for some of the site’s most prolific users.

Mobile is playing a big role in that drive for more usage. LinkedIn says that mobile is its fastest-growing consumer service at the moment, with 27% of its 155 million monthly users visiting LinkedIn via mobile apps (up from just 8% two years ago); and weekly mobile page views jumping 250% year-over-year.

LinkedIn is not committing to launching everything new on mobile at the same time as desktop, as it is with Contacts — “We believe in a multi-app approach when the use case warrants,” a spokesperson said — but it’s likely you will see a lot more features coming to mobile in the future. In the case of the new Contacts app, that will include special calendar and to-do views that bring in some of the features from LinkedIn’s flagship app. Rekhi also says that some features of Contacts will also likely be making their way to the main app in the future, too.

With the Contacts iPhone app, LinkedIn is opting again for a native-first approach: this reinforces comments made by LinkedIn last week, when it launched new versions of its Android and iPhone apps.

At the time, Kiran Prasad, head of mobile engineering for LinkedIn, described native as “more efficient” than HTML5 and mobile websites, while its head of mobile products, Joff Redfern, said that the company would be focusing more on native app experiences because some features simply were not possible to create yet on the mobile web.

That’s not to say multiple plaforms do not matter: with Contacts, Rekhi says Android and mobile web versions will be coming next.

At least in this early stage of the product, Contacts falls into a somewhat grey area between what are professional contacts and what are personal contacts, and what role LinkedIn plays.

Facebook and Twitter contacts are not included as import options right now. “Our members are focused are on professional life,” Rekhi explained as the reason for that.

But on the other hand, when asked if contacts from professional services like salesforce.com or other CRM networks will be importable in the future, Rekhi’s answer there was, “Our current focus is making it easy [to manage] personal relationships, not leverage those in the workplace setting.”

In the blurry areas between work and leisure that many of us occupy these days, you can kind of see what he means, but it’s also neither here nor there. But that’s possibly to LinkedIn’s advantage right now, as it continues to grow and figure out where it can compete or complement Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yammer and the rest.

One clue to where social networks may play a role in a later iteration of Contacts, however, is with Rapportive, the chrome extension that lets you view a contact’s public social media posts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. LinkedIn acquired Rapportive a little over a year ago and has retained it as a standalone product.

“You can imagine integration with these kinds of applications in the future, but right now it’s not tied in,” said Rekhi. “They are separate services with separate database backends.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn Acquires Pulse For $90M In Stock And Cash

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LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.

Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been rumors about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now.

LinkedIn argues that it is acquiring Pulse because it wants the site to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs.”

“We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, in a statement today. “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Standford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. Just recently, Pulse started to dip its toes into social by adding a number of social features to its apps. Given today’s acquisition, chances are Pulse will put a stronger focus on this in the near future.

The service currently has about 30 million users in more than 190 countries. Approximately 40 percent of its users are outside of the U.S.

Kothari writes in his announcement today that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.”

Pulse raised an $800,000 seed round in October 2010. Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, e.ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in this round. In June 2011, Pulse raised a $9 million Series A round from New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures.

Updating…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn Adds Facebook-Style Mentions Of People And Companies In Status Updates And Home-Page Comments

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LinkedIn has just announced on its blog that a new Facebook-style mention feature, letting users tag companies or users, is officially official.

This morning, TNW noticed a feature being tested on LinkedIn that would let users mention other LinkedIn members or companies in status updates, instantly sending a notification to that user or company’s profile. Not every user had access to the mention feature this morning, but it appears LinkedIn is rolling it out to users as we speak.

Mentions aren’t revolutionary by any means. Facebook has had an auto-complete feature built in for a while now that lets you select a friend from a drop-down menu as soon as you begin typing a name. Before that, Twitter was the real origin of the mention, with the help of a now-ubiquitous @ symbol.

On LinkedIn, you simply type in the name of the LinkedIn connection or company within the status update field. You’ll see a drop-down menu with matches, and once you post, that user or company will see your status update appear in their notifications list.

You’ll also be able to mention other LinkedIn Members, outside of first-degree connections, in the comments section of posts on the LinkedIn Home Page. That is, as long as those members have engaged in the same comments section. LinkedIn is home to some of the most important business news in the industry, and this should help the social network grow engagement amongst its users on the platform itself.

According to the blog post, LinkedIn mentions “will make it easier for you to start conversations with your network while also enabling you to respond in real-time when someone begins a conversation with you.”

If you are an English-speaking member of LinkedIn, you should see the feature start working sometime in the near future. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is working on integrating mentions into other parts of the site, beyond status updates and home page comments.



Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sunrise Update Brings LinkedIn Profiles, Recurring Events And Notes To The Calendar App

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iOS calendar app Sunrise received its first update a month after its release, bringing more info and flexibility to your calendar. The team has pushed the LinkedIn integration a step forward by bringing the entire profile into the app. Now you can check previous work experiences and education from Sunrise’s interface.

“The feedback we got from our launch is that Sunrise really changes your calendar,” co-founder Pierre Valade said in a phone interview. “Using your calendar becomes a true pleasure,” he continued. During its initial development, the team really focused on the user experience because they found that other apps were lacking in this area.

But the company also received two other pieces of feedback regarding Facebook Connect and event features. Users didn’t want to use their Facebook account to create a Sunrise account. So it added the ability to log in with Google — Sunrise only works with Google Calendar for now.

Heavy calendar users also requested two new features that come with today’s update. You can now create recurring events directly from your phone and you can add notes to your events. This data is synchronized with your Google Calendar.

“There are still a lot of features that we want to implement,” Valade said. “This update shows that we are still adding value to your calendar by using existing data from LinkedIn and other services,” he continued.

Now, when you create an event and invite someone, you’ll get LinkedIn information, links to Facebook, your address book and LinkedIn, and the ability to text, call or email someone very easily. The app also uses Facebook profile pictures and cover photos. While Sunrise is not an address book, that contact info is very informative yet doesn’t require any effort on your part.

The New York-based company now plans to release regular update addressing top feature requests more or less every month. It remains to be seen whether they’ll port the app to other platforms in the future as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Collegefeed Launches With Service To Connect Students And Employers, Offers What They Can’t Get At LinkedIn

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Collegefeed launched today, offering a social platform for students to connect with each other and employers long before the career fairs and short interviews begin. The service is designed for college kids who do not have the experience yet to have any meaningful use of LinkedIn and need to connect in different ways than people already in the workforce.

The platform offers a Facebook-like news feed where students can access tuition help, job opportunities, interview-preparation help and access to alumni and mentors. Collegefeed seeks to “teach, tell and guide” instead of leaving students with search as the default when looking for a job. Relevant information, based on students’ interests, is “pushed” to a student’s news feed. The information might include what jobs the person may like; alumni to connect with; available internships or potential awards the student may be qualified to win.

The platform will connect employers with students as they progress through school as opposed to forcing decisions through short interviews, career fairs and campus visits. They do this by bringing together a network of employers and alumni who can get students access to well-paying jobs with the Valley’s leading technology companies. It will also offer competitions for students to  vie for awards and help pay for college tuition.

“Early career profiles need to be very different from late-career profiles. They need to focus on portfolios / class projects / thesis work, internships, etc.,” said Sanjeev Agrawal, founder, CEO of Collegefeed in an email interview. “Agrawal was formerly the product marketing chief at Google. “Very hard for these kids to stand out on other networks. Our competitions and awards program is meant to precisely help these students show off their skills.”

The service is going into beta with three Silicon Valley schools: Carnegie Mellon SV, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley. Organizers say the service will go nationwide by the end of 2013.

Collegefeed will market employer-branded pages that give them a presence on the site, Agrawal said. This will allow employers to connect in a news feed setting where students tend to gather.

Companies seeking college graduates have relied for the past 20 years on well-worn tactics. Recruiting can get expensive, and so employers usually do the bare minimum. If they do go to colleges, then it’s usually for individual interviews. The result: 40 percent of employers who try this method report they can’t fill early career jobs.

“We make many more employers relevant to many more students,” he said. “Everyone wants to work at Google and Facebook, but we can be smart about saying ‘If you want jobs in mobile payments or big data etc’ you have many choices. Even traditional companies like Safeway become interesting because they have had ‘big data’ before some of these newer companies existed and are working on some really interesting problems.”

Agrawal said competitors do not provide all that Collegefeed offers. He said some examples are, “Mindsumo (online challenges for college kids), Zinch (financial awards) Readyforce (tech/startup recruitment), Branchout (networking on Facebook) and BraveNewTalent (online professional networking).” Important to note that BraveNewTalent recently did a pivot.

Collegefeed is a smart play. It looks like it will provide a more holistic and complete service for students and employers, opening both to opportunities they did not know existed.

But is this something LinkedIn can kill if it decided to move into this market? Collegefeed has its work cut out for it with such a major competitor. Data analytics increasingly provide LinkedIn with ways to offer new services. Features that Collegefeed offers might be incrementally added to LinkedIn and packaged as a service. In the meantime, Collegefeed will need to gather as much interaction data as it can to provide a level of personalized service that will be critical to maintain.

The need for qualified people is increasingly a challenge for employers. Services such as Collegefeed will become increasingly valuable as companies modernize their approaches to job recruitment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BraveNewTalent Admits ‘Social Recruitment’ Didn’t Work, But Pivot To Enterprise Is ‘Paying Off’

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BraveNewTalent launched as a ‘social recruitment’ platform back in 2010 and went on to secure VC funding a year later. But last year saw the startup pivot in a big way. The original model was geared towards the idea that people would want to follow companies they might want to work for in the future, and companies in turn wanted to educate potential hires about how they work. If the recruitment process was started earlier earlier – even before positions became available – some of the talent issues would go away. At least that was the theory.

Back in 2011 BNT had secured an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from Northzone Ventures and two angels. Clients like IBM, Tesco, L’Oreal and McAfee started using the platform, which also integrated with Facebook, just as other ‘recruitment apps’ operated, such as BranchOut, JIBE, Superscout and Emp.ly.

In reality, however, says CEO and founder Lucia Tarnowski, “We realised we were trying to build communities around recruitment content. But trying to build user engagement around transactional content like that doesn’t work. Job seekers just wanted jobs, and recruiters just wanted to fill positions. So the model didn’t scale just focusing on jobs.”

So six months ago BNT pivoted towards being 100 percent enterprise focused, and went from ‘social recruiting’ to ‘social learning’.

Is this just semantics or is there now a real difference in what they do?

Well, the new model means companies on the platform can still recruit from an audience of users, but the whole thing is not nearly so ‘job centric’. Instead, says Tarnowski, it is now ‘learning centric’ around the content that is produced – not just by the companies, but by the users themselves.

Perhaps the best way to think of it is if you took Yammer, opened it to anyone to join, then gave them a free hand to post content that was relevant to your industry. Sure it sounds not unlike LinkedIn, but the difference here is that LinkedIn is not used inside the enterprise (like a Yammer). Indeed, BNT looks like it is going to end up having a foot in both the free-wheeling Internet and the enterprise communications world.

Looking at the new interface you can see how this might be. The new BNT looks reminiscent of how a Yammer might be opened up to be more porous between both internal employees and external users who might one day be called in for an interview.

Endorsements, LinkedIn’s Answer To Klout, Passes 1B Recommendations And Builds Up A New Data Set

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Endorsements, a lightweight way for people on LinkedIn to recommend each other’s skills, has picked up some significant traction in its first five months of life. Today, LinkedIn is announcing that Endorsements has passed the 1 billion milestone — with 58 million members getting recognition on their profiles for different areas of expertise, according to a blog post from Peter Rusev. The marker is a sign that, were LinkedIn so inclined, it could likely give sites likes Klout, which measure influencer status, a run for their money.

Before the introduction of endorsements five months ago, LinkedIn let users gather testimonials about their skills — but these were in the form of longer recommendations. Those written recommendations are still there, but what endorsements has done is turn this into a quicker process, as fast as it takes a user to click a box, with a prompt for adding them in appearing at the top of profile pages to encourage more endorsing.

Endorsements serve several purposes for LinkedIn. For starters, they help increase engagement on the site, and keep people on the site for longer, giving them more possibilities to get exposed to other services (and ads).

They also give users the chance to provide more enhanced pictures of themselves — useful, since one of the main reasons for LinkedIn usage (despite all its moves to become central news information hubs) remain around people finding jobs. And along those lines, endorsements are also getting used as ways for people to network with each other. LinkedIn tells me that when users get endorsed their profiles appear higher up in searches, making them four times more likely to be seen by others.

For now, LinkedIn is still focused on building up a massive data set based on these endorsements and is therefore keeping all monetization elements out for now. “The product is completely free to access/use and there are no plans to make this a premium experience,” a spokesperson tells me.

However, that’s not to say that LinkedIn’s endorsements won’t be evolving in other ways, including seeing the data get integrated into other paid products.

“We are looking at different ways to integrate the signals we are gathering from endorsements into other products across LinkedIn, such as search and our recruiter product,” she notes. “Our focus here will be on the most natural way for the data to help our members be found on LinkedIn.” That follows on from the fact that your profile is four times more likely to be found if you get endorsed. “We are also continuing to improve the algorithm behind the suggestions we prompt to our members to help them give relevant endorsements to their connections,” she added.

LinkedIn is keen to show that it is a social network for the whole of the working world, not just those of us who spend the whole day thinking about technology, glued to our screens. LinkedIn has singled out what it claims to be both its first endorsement and its one-billionth. They are, respectively, an endorsement was for C++ programming skills, and an endorsement for water treatment — conveniently jobs at the opposite ends of the career spectrum.

Still, the top 10 list remains fairly firmly in white-collar territory.

[Note: This post is not an endorsement of endorsements.]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn Hits 200 Million Users Worldwide — Adding New Users At Rate Of Two Per Second

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LinkedIn has announced it has reached 200 million users worldwide — with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day). Not bad for a professional social network (but obviously still a far cry from Facebook’s one billion+).

LinkedIn clocked up its first 100 million members back in March 2011, underlining how its growth rate has accelerated in recent times – with the network adding more than 13 million members since its last announcement on November 1, 2012. Back in January 2009 membership stood at 32 million.

In a blog announcing the new membership figure, Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior VP of products and user experience, described it as an “important and exciting milestone”. The company has produced a celebratory infographic to mark the moment.

LinkedIn’s membership spans more than 200 countries and territories. The U.S. remains its biggest market, followed by India. Membership in its largest markets breaks down as follows:

  • USA (74m)
  • India (18m)
  • UK (11m)
  • Brazil (11m)
  • Canada (7m)

The fastest growing countries for LinkedIn membership are  Turkey, Colombia and Indonesia, respectively. Mobile use of the site is growing fastest in China, followed by Brazil, Portugal, India and Italy.

The most followed ‘key influencers’ on LinkedIn — a Twitter-style feature, which LinkedIn added back in the fall that allows users to receive updates from other high profile users they are interested in — are 1) businessman and entrepreneur Richard Branson; 2) U.S. President Barack Obama; 3) alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra; 4) self-help book author Tony Robbins; and at 5) LinkedIn’s own CEO, Jeff Weiner.

LinkedIn’s membership momentum this year has been matched by rising revenue growth: its Q3 revenues were up 81 per cent year-over-year, and up 10 per cent sequentially on Q2 revenues.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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