Hi bruwin, agree with your general comments. It is true that LinkedIn is structured differently from other social-media sites, yet in the sense that it maintains a "social graph" it is still a social network.
I use the phrase "content graveyard" to refer to a situation where users post large volumes of content that other users don't interact with. For instance, if you post a photo or event on Facebook, the interaction/ content ratio is very high (users will like/ emote, tag themselves, comment, etc). In LinkedIn your work history is certainly searchable so people can find you based on companies/ coworkers, but users generally aren't interacting with that content (exceptions would be things like "recommendations"). So while there is a lot of content in LinkedIn the interaction/ content ratio is quite low.
This does not mean that LinkedIn is not a useful site (in some ways the connections are more meaningful than those in Facebook), but it does mean that, like Twitter, LinkedIn struggles to drive traffic to its platform. This is why they monetize based on recruitment rather than ads.
Setting aside its utility, I am not sure how strong a "business moat" LinkedIn really is. They decided to go the route of trying to steal business from CareerBuilder and Indeed, and in the process they downplayed user engagement. I don't know which model is better, but it's hard to deny that Facebook's is stickier. Users can always enter their CV on another job site, but interactive content (e.g. all the photos you posted since college together with all the interactions and linkages based on those photos) is virtually impossible to port elsewhere. |
