LinkedIn Wants Users to Connect More

I view LinkedIn solely as an online resume site. I believe a better route for LinkedIn would be to compete with Monster.com or CareerBuilder and build a social networking job site. With all the "resumes" currently stored on LinkedIn it is probably one of, if not the largest, holders of personal job/work experience in the world.

A business idea would be to create a mashup of sorts pulling information from users profiles and matching them with potential career opportunities on a job board site. LinkedIn could then charge a premium for providing the user and/or the company with a list of potential job opportunities and/or potential candidates. Taking it one step further would be to incorporate some form of background check/education verification into the platform for the companies. A user could select whether they are open to receive job postings or be included in job searches by companies. They could also select which types of companies they want to be included in. I am sure that LinkedIn could develop some sort of algorithm to provide benefit to the job seeking users while at the same time reducing potential spam in the users inbox.

Taking the idea one step further would be to charge a fee for resume assistance in helping users build their profiles to highlight current and past experiences. Many times I know (myself included) that users just list the company name/job title and do not include what they did at the company.

LinkedIn should let users post an online "portfolio" of their work. This would be hugely useful for designers, but could be extrapolated to a general solution for everyone. Programmers could link to Github repos and/or production projects. I'd love to show the photos and news coverage of the solar car I built and raced back at University...

This could be relatively straightforward to do and could be hugely valuable for both job-seekers AND employers looking for candidates.

> turns a profit from ads and recruitment services

I spent a lot of time working on a startup in a related space, and came to realize that the real customers of LinkedIn are the recruiters. As long as they can get you to enter your details, they can get thousands of dollars a year from individual recruiters for access to your information.

Look at their site as a service for recruiters which happens to require consumer input. They want you to be promiscuous in your connections, since weak-but-wide links are more effective for recruiting than strong-but-narrow 'true friendships'. They don't have much incentive to drive users to interact with the site, beyond keeping their details up-to-date.

It sounds like they're interested in becoming more compelling to consumers, but I wonder how deep that commitment goes when there's no immediate revenue stream from it?

Here's one older article that discusses LinkedIn's revenue model: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/technology/18linkedin.html

Use the News and Discussion features of linked in to drive traffic to client Wordpress blog articles. It's a soft sell mechanism, a gateway for offers on the blog page. I am always pleased with the quality targeted traffic I get through this process.

If your tired of paying for $1.00 click thrus, the silly keyword scoring BS, rampant competitor click fraud, and not knowing anything about your traffic unless it converts, switch tactics.

I don't give a hoot about how Linked In makes its buck. A free account allows you to join 50 groups. If you setup a profile aimed at your target demo, and then join the right groups, you can post a weekly blog article notice that gets seen by 250k+ real human beings that actually converse about the topics you write about.

If you are a smart cookie you can leverage low cost labor for about $25 a week to write the article, post the notice across 50 groups, and average about 5000 real nice visitors a week. No click fraud, engaged readers, 1-2% conversions for your paying adv's. What would the same 20,000 clicks cost you on Google?

That's what Linked In is good for...

And Twitter too...

Facebook, not so much...

Facebook is useless for this, as a personal account maxes at 5k. Useless.

If LinkedIn want greater engagement, they need to start offering professional functionality that is useful on a day to day basis. LinkedIn Answers is okay, but they would do very well to partner with StackOverflow (or do their own take on the StackExchange platform) for example.

Offering tools like TripIt is a good start. They should try and expand their applications to things like expense tracking, etc, while also doing a better job of making the applications visible and useful.

What I have never understood about LinkedIn: If I am looking for a new job, why would I want my current cow-orkers, including managers at my current employer, to know about it? Keeping your profile up to date is one thing; soliciting recommendations from current cow-orkers is a broad hint and setting your status to be "is looking for a new job" is blatant. How can it possibly work?

Competing with CareerBuilder and Monster is a waste of time. Both of these sites will eventually become irrelevant -- searching for a job by typing in a few keywords is unnatural. People hear about jobs thru friends, professional acquaintances, work product (GitHub, StackOverflow, etc), and local businesses (signs) and as LinkedIn becomes more prevalent they will grab more then their fair share of this market without trying very hard.

The far bigger opportunity for LinkedIn is to aggregate business leads. Are you looking to outfit your company with new laptops this year, looking for a block of hotel rooms for a conference, looking for an event management company, looking to upgrade accounting systems. Each of these leads is worth hundreds of dollars and helping businesses find good vendors is not easy (consultants make billions of dollars/yr making vendor recommendations).

If Linked-In ever wants us to connect more often, first they should lower their subscription prices. At $25/month, it's a rip-off, and without a subscription the site looks useless and is not worth visiting too often.

I'm currently subscribed to the rival social networking site Xing.com at about 5.5 EUR/month and satisified with the service being provided.

A social site bending over backwards to be perfectly devoid of fun. Is it any wonder the users don't interact more?