LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner recently delivered the LinkedIn 2014 Company Presentation; outlining growth, value propositions for both members and customers, their vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, and the development of the Economic Graph.
LinkedIn’s Mission Statement: “Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”.
Jeff cites “professionals” as the most important word in that mission statement.
Here are a few key growth stats:
- They’ve grown from 32 million members at the end of 2008 to 277 million members at the end of 2013.
- Page views have grown from 2 billion to 47 billion in the same time period.
- Mobile traffic has grown from <2% to 41%
- Revenue has grown from $79 million to $2,529 million
Core value proposition: Connect talent with opportunity at massive scale
Jeff reiterates that LinkedIn have a continued focus on placing their members first. They are focused in 3 areas:
Professional Identity:
The professional profile of record
The aim is for members to leverage LinkedIn to be able to connect, find or be found by other professionals. It all starts with the personal profile, which is increasingly replacing the CV. People are now updating their profile when they’re not looking for work because it reflects their professional personality. Profiles should not just reflect what they do, but represent them visually with rich media such as pictures, videos and presentations. Adding to your profile “at the click of a button” is key. Users could add certifications once completed and employers will be able to search for these kinds of qualifications through the recruiter platform.
Networks:
Connecting all of the world’s professionals
600 million knowledge workers and students, or ‘pre-professionals’. They are going to be localising LinkedIn into simplified Chinese. There are 140 million professionals and students in China. Students represent a huge opportunity. Last year LinkedIn rolled out University profiles and are continuing to invest in tools to leverage LinkedIn for students. Reaching out to alumni is also key.
Knowledge:
The definitive professional publishing platform
- Slideshare
- Groups
- Pulse
- Influencers
These assets are generating over 80 million unique users per month, which ranks LinkedIn as one of the top business publishers on the internet. One of the key successes has been their Influencers programme, where experts can publish their thoughts and knowledge and be followed by members. On average, Influencer posts have generated over 30,000 views. LinkedIn have recently opened this up to more people. Now, every member of LinkedIn can share their expertise. These posts are also immediately integrated into the person’s profile as they hit publish.
For customers, LinkedIn transform the way they:
Hire: LinkedIn powers half of all the hires that their talent solutions customers are generating. LinkedIn have emerged as the leading platform for passive candidate recruiting at scale. They want to invest in the volume of jobs and the ability to match the right member to the right job at the right time.
Market: LinkedIn want to be the most effective way for marketers to engage with professionals. Marketing solutions customers are able to integrate content on a paid basis directly into the home page news stream. Quality of content is very important. 70% of revenue from sponsored updates is from mobile.
Sell: LinkedIn want to be there at the start of every sales opportunity. It’s still early days, but they want to emerge as a leader in social selling. There are 3 key focus points here: Find, Connect and Engage.
Another key theme for LinkedIn in Mobile. They have a multi-app strategy. In 2014 they expect to reach their “mobile moment”, where over half of all of their traffic will be coming through mobile.
Thinking bigger: The next decade:
LinkedIn’s vision: “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce”
LinkedIn are really looking to make this happen in 3 key areas:
- Find work
- Realise your dream job
- Be great at what you do
Key challenges:
- The youth unemployment rate in Europe is 23%.
- There are 4 million available jobs in the US.
- China want 250 million people to transition from rural China to cities by 2025 to create a thriving middle class. This would be the largest such migration of human capital in the history of civilisation.
The Economic Graph:
LinkedIn want to develop the world’s first economic graph. To digitally represent and map the global economy.
- To create a digital profile for every member of the global workforce
- To create a digital profile for every company in the world
- To have a digital representation of every job offered by these companies
- To have a digital representation of every skill required to obtain these jobs
- To have a presence for every higher education organisation and learning and development tool that would enable members to obtain those skills
- To overlay the professionally relevant knowledge for every one of those individual members, companies and universities to the extent that they want to share it
- To then step back and allow capital – intellectual, working and human – to flow to where it can best be leveraged and in doing so, transform the global economy.
The building blocks:
- 277 million members
- 3.5 million active company profiles
- 300 thousand jobs
- 3 billion endorsements
- 24 thousand schools and universities
- Billions of network updates on a weekly basis
The only thing standing between LinkedIn and the realisation of this economic graph is scale, which will simply require time.
Watch the video: LinkedIn’s Vision for the Next 10 Years
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