FreshNetworks Blog

Having already charted how LinkedIn has grown over the last eight years, as well as comparing the growth of LinkedIn to Facebook,  it’s time to take a look at the top 10 companies on LinkedIn.

Users on LinkedIn can be linked to a company in one of two ways; by being an employee or by following the company. The top 10 followed companies on LinkedIn are  IBM, HP, Accenture, Microsoft, Oracle, Deloitte, PwC, Cisco, Apple, Google.

When looking at theses top ten companies on LinkedIn in more detail it becomes clear that there is a leader in both the number of followers and the number of employees on LinkedIn:

The chart shows there’s a clear trend between the size of the company (based on the number of employees on the platform) and the number of followers it has.

On average, each company has almost 2.5 followers for each employee on the site.

However, there are a couple of ‘top performers’ – Apple has six followers to every employee while Google has eight. Perhaps this is not suprising given the ‘aspirational’ nature of both these brands from a professional and personal perspective.

Having already looked at how LinkedIn has grown over the last eight years,  we thought it would be interesting to look at the growth of LinkedIn in comparison to another online networking giant – Facebook – as well as in relation to Internet use in the more general sense.

Whilst LinkedIn’s growth has been continuous, the rate at which this growth is occurring has been in decline since 2007. This trend is in fact similar to both that of Facebook and also the Internet:

LinkedIn’s decrease in growth is not unexpected as saturation points are often seen within original/initial launch markets. In fact, when comparing the decline in growth across the three areas, LinkedIn’s user decrease correlates to that of the Internet, whereas Facebook has seen a rather more rapid decline.

What is interesting, though, is if you track growth for the first quarter this year and compare it to the previous two years growth, as this indicates that there will be a return to growth, not only for LinkedIn but also for both Internet use and Facebook too.

This is a bold prediction, specifically when news reports in June this year suggested that in developed markets, such as the USA, UK, Canada and Russia, there has been a loss in users month-on-month for Facebook.

So where will these new users come from? Eric Eldon, editor of Inside Network, which includes Inside Facebook was quoted in The Guardian saying that:

“…by the time Facebook reaches around 50% of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt … So far, Facebook has been able to make up stalls and losses with big gains in heavily populated developing countries like Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia.”

Eldon’s words actually apply to LinkedIn too and recent figures on LinkedIn’s own blog highlighted Brazil, Mexico and India as markets with the fastest growth rates.

Indeed, overall, global memberships – free and paid for – on LinkedIn grew to 115.8 million in second quarter of this year, up 61% on 2010. By contrast, Facebook, which is also said to be mooting an IPO, has more than 750 million members.

Our next post, as part of our LinkedIn Week series, will look at the top 10 companies on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has changed the online landscape for employers and employees alike. The growth rate since LinkedIn launched eight years ago has been phenomenal and it now has a user base of over 100 million people.

Given that LinkedIn is now the world’s largest  online professional network, we thought it would be interesting to look at the growth, current use and future direction of LinkedIn, as well as how brands and business can, and are, using if effectively. So this  week is LinkedIn week here at FreshNetworks and over the next five days we’ll be blogging about all things LinkedIn in the run up to a free report which will be available to download on Friday.

LinkedIn’s growth to date

(A full, high resolution version of this chart will be available in the final report on Friday 12th August).

Since its launch back in May 2003, the exceptional increase in the number of users on LinkedIn has been largely due to continuous platform development and the roll out of new features.

According to its recent ‘Growth Filing Report’ released on 27th June 2011, LinkedIn had hit the 90 million user mark at the end of 2010; already by the end of Q1 2011, user numbers had gone beyond the 100 million mark.

Aside from the growth in users, LinkedIn has also recently announced a revenue increase – 120% up year on year to $121m (£74m) in the three months to June. Profit was also up to $4.5m (£2.8m), compared to $4.3m (£2.6m) in the previous year.

Our next post will look at the growth of LinkedIn in comparison to Facebook.

Today saw the launch of a new job search engine Adzuna, which integrates Facebook and LinkedIn contacts to help job hunters get ahead of the competition.

Adzuna works by aggregating existing job postings from sites such as Monster, TotalJobs and LinkedIn, which in itself is a great time-saver for job hunters.

Where Adzuna really shines though is by “connecting” your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts, helping you get the most from your friends and connections on both social networks.

So how does it work?

Once you have shared your contact details, the search engine pulls up any of your contacts who work at companies which have vacancies on the Adzuna database. You can send a message directly from within Adzuna to your connection, with a link to the job details, and get the ball rolling from there.

It’s quite unobtrusive and you don’t have to create a new social network, unlike on  BranchOut and BeKnown, the other job hunting and professional networking tools on the market at the moment.  In fact the only time you need to contact your friend through Adzuna is to make them aware of your intention to pursue a job once you’ve found something that you’re really interested in.

We spoke to Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna and formerly of Qype and Gumtree, to learn some more about the social integration:

Could you tell us a bit about how and why you decided to develop Adzuna Connect in the way you have?

We want to make the job search experience much, much better.  Social is a key part of that and we believe a social layer gives job seekers a distinct advantage in the market. Understanding where you can get a quick intro through a friend to an employer or even get the low down on what it’s really like to work at a company is incredibly valuable job seekers – we want to make this a seamless part of our search.

Currently Adzuna seems to be geared primarily for job hunters. Do you have plans to offer services for recruiters to help them search for candidates?

Not for the time being. In the short run, we want to focus our efforts on building the best possible search experience for job hunters. Recruiters will benefit naturally from the traffic we refer to them immediately and in the future we will provide services to allow them to showcase their vacancies to a wider audience. For now though, it’s all about the job seekers.

Currently the LinkedIn jobs are just for your first-degree connections – are there plans to have the option for broader searches?

Absolutely. Watch this space, as what you can see now is only a beta version.  We see huge value in being able to leverage your friends’ networks as well as your own to find the perfect job.

You have stated that the job ads are just the beginning, and that you intend for Adzuna to serve property and car classifieds too. How will Adzuna manage social search for these listings?

There will be obvious differences and we’re keen to only make social connections where users find the connection / information genuinely useful. There’s no point in ‘doing social’ for the sake of being cool. So to take property as an example, users looking for a house in a new area might be interested in which of their friends live in the local area and what people on twitter say about it. We hope to fold relevant social signals like this into all of our verticals to ensure the best possible search experience.

Finally, is there anything else you would like to add about Adzuna?

For those of your readers who are wondering where the name “Adzuna” comes from, “Zuna” means “abundance” in a number of African languages. We aim to be the most abundant classified ads site on the the web, and to bring you the best ads sooner than anyone else. Hence the name Ad-zuna.

Oh, and make sure you try the connect feature here – http://jobs.adzuna.co.uk/connect.html

Adzuna is currently in beta and already has over  300,000 live UK job vacancies listed. We’re looking forward to seeing how it develops.

When it comes to using professional social networks, LinkedIn has long been the original and specialist network. Hot on LinkedIn’s heels are two Facebook apps which aim to take advantage of Facebook’s vast user base. Are these apps a sign of the future of professional networking, or should we continue to keep our personal and professional personas separated?

Both of these apps do stress that they allow you complete separation between your ‘regular’, social Facebook presence, and your professional one. They effectively allow you to create a new profile page, and build a separate network that will never see personal material such as your wall and tagged photos. What else do they offer?

BranchOut

BranchOut has been on the scene since July 2010, but has recently gained remarkable growth and increased user activity. The app is arguably very self promoting, verging on the side of spam (see this post for a breakdown of its viral techniques) and having tested it myself I was disappointed to see that the default choice for inviting friends was to post on their wall rather than sending a private invitation as a message.

BranchOut aims to gamify professional networking by using badges as incentives for growing your network. The danger in this is that it will perhaps motivate some people to focus on the the volume of their network rather than the quality ot it. It’s also possible to gift badges to other users, making recommendations and endorsements too easy can perhaps diminishing their value.

BeKnown

Recently launched by job-hunting site Monster.com, BeKnown offers a very similar approach to BranchOut, offering a partition between your professional and social spheres.

BeKnown also utilities badges as an incentive for making connections as well as giving and receiving endorsements. It appears that BeKnown uses a less intrusive approach to inviting friends, and the top badge for number of connections is at 500, which places a cap similar to LinkedIn.

As it is early days for BeKnown we may have to wait and see what the uptake is like amongst users. While the link to the jobs listed on Monster.com will surely be an attractive lure to job hunters, it will be interesting to see how BeKnown handles the headstarts gained by LinkedIn and BranchOut.