LinkedIn’s main problem is that, as it says itself in its S-1 filing, the vast majority of LinkedIn members don’t actually use it. To be blunt: it’s just not useful for the majority of users. It’s only a minority of people like recruiters and salespeople who use the site.
The actual statement from LinkedIn’s Initial Public Offering filing is the following (quoting from this article):
the number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members.
Isn’t that interesting? This has me wondering what people could use if LinkedIn wasn’t around? Facebook is more personal but the BranchOut app seems to be trying to leverage Facebook for business (although I am pretty wary of BranchOut – its focus seems to be on leveraging my connections to spam my friends as a condition for my access to the app). Would people just use email, Twitter and whatever else is available? How much do we need a business social network?
I also came across some really interesting LinkedIn stats in the filing:
RSS – Posts
What do you think?