Amid Threat From Rivals, LinkedIn Takes a Page from Facebook's Playbook

Ms. Nejaime, a San Francisco real-estate agent, uses LinkedIn to stay in touch with her 183-person network, check out job prospects and see if someone might be interested in one of the homes she's selling. But she typically logs in only a few times a month because she says the site lacks features.

"I would like to get more use out of it," said Ms. Nejaime "I just don't know how." By contrast, the 47-year-old says she uses Facebook every day to touch base with friends and professional contacts.

It's up to LinkedIn's chief executive, Jeff Weiner, to give people like Ms. Nejaime reasons to spend more time on LinkedIn, which is mostly used by professionals to post their resumes and by corporate recruiters looking for talent.

Mr. Weiner, 39, a former senior executive at Yahoo Inc., took over LinkedIn a year ago with a mandate to reinvigorate the six-year-old business. While LinkedIn's membership has continued to surge, reaching 53.6 million at the end of November from 31.5 million a year ago, it has been dwarfed by Facebook, which has surpassed 350 million members.

More importantly, the amount of time people devote to LinkedIn is a fraction of the time people spend on some other social sites. Visitors spent about 13 minutes on average at LinkedIn during October, while Facebook users logged about 213 minutes and MySpace users spent 87 minutes, according to research firm comScore, which measured the behavior of global users 15 years and older.

LinkedIn is "not really a community as much as a collection" of names, says Brigantine Advisors analyst Colin Gillis. "They are definitely in danger of losing the business-networking market."

External Source - For the complete article click here.

Source - WSJ

Reader Comments:

Be the first to leave a comment for this article