Nick O’Neill has an interesting post on his very good “Social Times” site. (How, by the way, does he find time to post so much??)
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Seems that LinkedIn is growing faster on a percentage basis than Facebook is. Here’s the data:
These Nielsen statistics show 189% growth for LinkedIn versus 125% growth for Facebook. Nick also sites compete.com’s stats that show 400% growth for LinkedIn.
Unfortunately, Nick doesn’t say (and the chart doesn’t show) how they are measuring growth (i.e., registered users, user sessions, page views, etc.).
A couple thoughts on what’s behind this:
1) LinkedIn is smaller than Facebook, so when you measure percentage growth, smaller sites have an obvious advantage.
2) LinkedIn has a clear value proposition to older business people who have a tougher time seeing the value of Facebook initially. Many people over 40 still feel a bit weird going on Facebook.
3) Building a profile on LinkedIn is no harder than inputting your resume. Setting up a Facebook profile that doesn’t embarrass you takes a little more thought.
As for me, I do both (feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or connect with me on Facebook), although I admit to joining LinkedIn first a long time ago and I’ve been seeing a lot of colleagues jumping aboard in the last few months so the growth isn’t surprising.
What’s most interesting to the social media agency employee in me is this: people don’t seem to be going online with the purpose of engaging with social media, but more and more of them are. Opportunity………
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