Want to see a social network at its Tipping Point? Take another look at Linked-In. The business socnet is starting to look a lot like Facebook did a few years back, and it’s had two new users since you read this headline. Linked-In audiences now top 100m people. More details, and implications for marketers…
The site, which aims to facilitate professional networking in the digital space, has been adding roughly one million new members every 12 days; the equivalent of one new member joining every second, according to the service’s own figures.
In December 2010, the site had attracted five million plus members in the UK and 20 million in Europe.
Last year Facebook hit 500 million members globally and last month announced it had attracted 30 million registered members in the UK – making up half of the population.
LinkedIn launched in 2003 and started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman.
It took 494 days to sign up the first million members. More than half of its members are now located outside of the US.
Two weeks ago LinkedIn launched a personalised news service in a bid to attract more of its users to the site with greater frequency.
LinkedIn Today aggregates news from around the web, serving up a range of stories based on a user’s professional interests and the articles which have proved popular amongst a user’s friends.
Stories are ordered based on how many people in a user’s LinkedIn network tweeted or shared them.
There is also a dropdown box which on LinkedIn Today which allows users to personalise the story by industry.
Analysts believe the site is trying to boost its traffic and user engagement rate and subsequently its advertising revenues, ahead of its expected IPO (Initial Public Offering) on the US stock market.
Although LinkedIn’s membership numbers have reached a new high, many people do not visit the site or look at their profiles every day in the way that they do with other networking sites, such as Facebook.
