Linkedin used to be a quiet place where professionals would go to update their profile, make new connections or know about what their friends and peers do from a professional point of view.

What’s new

This is all changing. These days I do notice lot more activities from Linkedin. LinkedIn is sending three types of mails to me on a regular basis.

1. Linkedin message on who viewed your profile.

2. LinkedIn pulse on new articles recommendation on Linkedin.com

3. Linkedin updates on job changes and work anniversaries of your connections. This allows you to stay up-to-date on your connections and “say congrats” much like “say happy birthday” feature of Facebook.

These changes are very interesting and my visits to Linkedin have somewhat increased. I never considered it to be a place to post my new blog articles but Linkedin is now 3rd topmost traffic driver to my website. Instead of a burst in traffic, it provides a steady traffic flow to my blog.

What is driving these changes?

So, the real question is what is driving these changes at Linkedin? Let us try to look at some important statistics.

– Linkedin has around 60 million users
– 85% use the free account
– 50% spend 0-2 hours/week

It is clear that Linkedin needs to make people spend more time with them if they want to be able to monetize a huge 85% of their user base. The question then is what should they do? Let us look at some more statistics.

– The 3 most helpful Linkedin features, based on recent statistics are – “who’s viewed your profile (70%)”, “people you may know (65%)” and groups (60%)
– Consider trends in social media. According to Pew Research, 78% of Facebook users mostly see news when on Facebook when they have logged into Facebook for other reasons. They are consuming news against their original intention. This is significant. It reflects human ability to pay more attention to news when it is coming from a known/trusted source.

Connecting data to Linkedin strategy

With this information, it is easy to see that Linkedin needs to do something that will help drive traffic to Linkedin.com. Providing regular mail updates on who’s viewed your profile makes sense. This is what their users have found most useful.

Using the latest trend in the way people consume news on social channels is an excellent way of reinventing itself. LinkedIn is focusing a lot on providing stories and news articles. This will allow them to move to monetization via sponsored stories.

The third piece of the puzzle is to engage users by making them do something when they visit Linkedin.com. This leads to higher page time and can be translated into various monetization and growth strategies. Endorsing your connection and “say congrats” is a good start.

However, this is also an area where much is left to be done. And I think Linkedin needs some sort of user experience refresh to allow them to take this engagement to a higher level.