In This Economy?

Photo: mediabistro

Well, at least someone is making money in this economy besides, say, oil companies and sales of high-end products like Mercedes and Coach.

According to this article in TIME, six-year-old social marketing site LinkedIn gets about 30% of its revenue from job search functions. And LinkedIn searches for jobs were up almost 20% between August and September of ’08. I can only imagine that number is closer to 90% now; what the hell else would people be using LinkedIn for? I know it’s not to answer some dork’s question about what’s going to happen to the newspaper or whatever. Yeah. LinkedIn is getting like one new member per second since the economy officially went to hell. So they are banking right now. And I’m calling DUH on that.

And How Does LinkedIn Make Money?

The short answer is via pay-per-use features, charging for higher account levels and advertising. Yet what kind of amazes me about LinkedIn is that despite its growth, a lot of people still don’t know what it is or why they should get an account. I understand people who think Twitter is lame (because they don’t understand its purpose or best uses), or who think Facebook is on its way out (because it kind of is). But I guess the reason why so many people don’t really know what LinkedIn is about, is that they probably won’t find out until they need it. For an employed person (knock on wood), LinkedIn is about keeping my page updated just in case. I’m not in any way checking it regularly, and I’m not really sniffing around on the site, because I don’t really see the point right now. There’s nothing much there that interests me, and even if there were, I’d suspect it would be hard to find it. For most people, they sign up, get their resume on there, link up with some peeps and then are like “Now what?” It’s a problem. So what did LinkedIn do to remedy this? They have opened the door to “partners” like Google and Amazon, as well as outside developers, to create applications, kind of like Facebook, but with way more control over them, kind of like Apple. So don’t expect to see any zany Top 5 Lists or Super Poke crap on LinkedIn (Whew!), but do expect to be lured back to the site by something useful, like book reviews by well-read people in your industry. It’s all just so professional!

Anyway, let’s get back to the point of this post.

It’s Summary Time!

The economy sucks. People are losing jobs. People are looking for new jobs. LinkedIn helps connect people looking for jobs to people looking for employees. Hence, more people are using LinkedIn. And finally, LinkedIn’s profits are up. Duh.

And if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile by now, go get one. Because in this economy, you’re likely going to need it.

Tags: economy, facebook, google, linkedin, making money, social marketing, TIME, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 3:03 PM and is filed under Good News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.