$10 Billion!

Welcome to this weeks dose of all things LinkedIn.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

From humble beginnings in May 2003, LinkedIn has become a global phenomenon and one of the true social media powerhouses with over 774 million members and a turnover now in excess of $10 billion a year. In this edition, I’m going to look into why and how they have achieved such success.

But before that…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn looks to premium publishers as a way to drive subscriber revenue This is an interesting new development by LinkedIn, it’s not a separate premium subscription, just an extra feature included with your Premium account (not Career subscription). It’s clearly very early in its rollout as I don’t appear to have it yet. LinkedIn describe the features as;

• Access to five Premium News credits to unlock paywalled (publisher locked/paid) articles every month from each of our partner publishers.
• Daily news recommendation curated for you by the LinkedIn editorial team.
• No additional subscriptions and no more passwords to remember because these are included in your Premium subscription.
• These publishers are apparently using the Piano paywall service including Axel Springer and Digiday who published the above article. Strangely though all their articles on LinkedIn appear to have free access anyway without obviously using any credits. That might be because they perhaps only put some of their content behind a paywall? It’s all rather confusing and if it’s designed to incentivize users to buy a Premium account then LinkedIn are doing a pretty shabby job of promoting it!
• Apparently, you can try the service for free as described in this help article

LinkedIn Adds New, Free Certification Courses to Help Showcase Your LinkedIn Marketing Knowledge

Confusingly these 2 free courses are not found on LinkedIn Learning, instead, you access them via the marketing and ads section of LinkedIn here. Once you have completed each course and successfully passed the test, you are able to show this in the certifications section of your profile.

I guess it’s good that they are free but let’s face it, LinkedIn are just doing this to increase ad sales.

You can even buy Aeroplanes on LinkedIn now! Malaysian Airlines posted this recently advertising 6 AIRBUS 380-800 aircraft! To be fair they seem to use their page very differently from others and they also tender for services via posts on a regular basis.

Be wary of LinkedIn Statistics, even from LinkedIn themselves!

Bruce Johnston updated and republished this excellent article this week which exposes the lies published about LinkedIn stats. It’s well worth a read and will make you think twice before believing anything you hear about LinkedIn numbers. In my experience, the only stats you can truly trust are those given during Microsoft earnings calls.

Click on the image to view the article

Despite having recently introduced profile pronouns and claiming to ‘Embody diversity, inclusion and belonging’ as one of their core values, LinkedIn made the decision to remove this very popular post

Not only that but they also suspended Jade Scotneys account!

Fortunately, both have since been restored and LinkedIn apologised for making a mistake but I’m curious to understand exactly how this happened. I suspect there might have been plenty of complaints from members and that meant that the post and her profile were automatically taken down before being reviewed by a real person - if so this has to be looked at as it can easily be abused.

Overall a massive PR blunder from LinkedIn!

Microsoft announces that LinkedIn has exceeded $10b turnover.

As always I have tuned into the latest quarterly earnings call from Microsoft to see if they had anything interesting to say about LinkedIn. This time they hit us with some pretty impressive stats including the following updated member numbers.

This is what they had to say in the earnings call;

LinkedIn’s revenue surpassed $10 billion for the first time this fiscal year, up 27 percent, a testament to how mission-critical the platform has become to help people connect, learn, grow, and get hired over the course of their careers.

In the past five years since our acquisition, revenue has nearly tripled, and growth has accelerated. LinkedIn has become a leader across multiple secular growth areas spanning B2B advertising, professional hiring, corporate learning, and sales intelligence. And, from LinkedIn profiles within Office, to LinkedIn Learning courses within Microsoft Viva, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator leads within Dynamics 365, we’ve brought together the power of LinkedIn and Microsoft to transform how people learn, sell, and connect.

LinkedIn has more than 774 million members who are more engaged than ever. Sessions were up 30 percent this quarter, compared to a year ago. And LinkedIn’s advertising business surpassed $1 billion in revenue this quarter for the first time, up 97 percent year over year, growing three times faster than the category.

You can read the full transcript here

The two highlights of this for me are the continued growth of the advertising business and the 30% increase in sessions (the latter clearly positively affecting the former). I have seen some commentators suggest these numbers are below those that Microsoft expected when they bought LinkedIn in 2016, I can’t find any evidence of that and even if it’s true, I think it’s hard to argue against LinkedIn being a major success story.

So how have they arrived here? I believe there are five key factors that been significant in the rise of LinkedIn;

1. Complete design overhaul from September 2016. This was massive at the time (announced here) and many members hated the new design, it was a brave move by LinkedIn designed to attract a new audience and one that would engage with the feed more. Whilst it has evolved since, the new Neptune design was a pivotal moment in the transformation of LinkedIn from a static, rather boring UI to a more interesting and engaging one. Here is a video I made at the time comparing the old to the new desktop designs

2. Focus away from Groups and towards the home page feed. This was a gradual process but the above redesign was a major step forward - Groups were becoming saturated with spam and engagement levels were dropping like a stone. LinkedIn needed to take back control and the only way they were able to do this was to concentrate users on their home page feed. Engagement gradually shifted to posts in the feed and this gave LinkedIn the opportunity to develop the algorithm and place ads in front of more users. The game was now to improve the quality of our feeds so that we stayed on the page for longer.

This is not a perfect science and we can still get frustrated by the quality and relevance of the content we see but this move allowed LinkedIn to make significant improvements and that has been a key factor in their growth in recent years.

3. Facebook Migration. Organic reach started to decline as early as 2014 on Facebook but some major algorithm changes made in 2018 were significant in that businesses found the only way they could reach their audience was to advertise. Facebook had struggled to find ways to monetise their user growth and this led to them becoming primarily an advertising product. This meant that commercial Facebook users either had to cough up advertising dollars or find another platform. LinkedIn’s new design had now settled in and had improved so many users migrated much of their online time and focus to LinkedIn.

These new (or newly active) users brought with them the experience of how to get followers attention. Content on LinkedIn became less about business and more focussed on topics that would consistently engage people. In other words, LinkedIn members began to really engage with each other. The timing of this combined with the focus on the feed facilitated a massive growth in activity on the platform.

4. Microsoft Takeover. Microsoft announced their acquisition of LinkedIn in June 2016, just a few months before the redesign (which LinkedIn had been working on for many months previously). Whilst Microsoft have remained true to their promise of allowing LinkedIn to continue to run independently, it can’t be ignored that having such a strong parent company with extensive in-house expertise and a huge customer base has given LinkedIn a very strong base on which to accelerate their growth. I’m pretty confident that LinkedIn would have achieved this growth without Microsoft eventually but being part of such a massive group has allowed them to get to $10b much more rapidly.

5. Less Focus on Recruitment. Whilst there are still some lazy journalists who refer to LinkedIn as ‘the jobsearch site’ most of us now recognise that the platform is really more about business networking and the network can provide its users with many benefits including recruitment but that use case no longer dominates.

Interestingly, recruitment is still LinkedIn’s largest revenue stream and massively important to them but they have successfully broadened the appeal of the site to a wide variety of businesses and business people with varied needs and objectives.

Those are the five factors that I believe have played the most significant roles but what about you, can you think of any other factors that you believe have been important?

Post Of The Week

I had several excellent nominations this week but I had to pick this one because the engagement numbers are quite phenomenal! With over 14,000 comments, I’m not sure I can recall a post doing quite so well!

The subject is clearly very topical at the moment and the message is a very personal and heart-wrenching one from Paul. Despite this post being written in Dutch and Paul only having 2115 followers, the views have gone stratospheric!

Interestingly, this post was not taken down by LinkedIn, yet the subject is very similar to that of Jade Scotneys’ featured earlier. Had it not been unfairly removed from the feed, that one might have attracted this level of engagement!

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

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