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??)
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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