32. The State of LinkedIn

News

• DIALaBRAIN find an innovative way to use the media section of a profile (see below)
• LinkedIn Mobile (iOS & Android) apps now allow you to customize your invitation message. Its not very intuitive but at least it can be done! Here is how you do it (iOS)

1, Do not click on the link in the shortlist

2, Ignore 'connect' and click on the share link in the top right corner

Write your message.

Credit to Viveka Von Rosen for spotting this. Unfortunately this technique is not possible on the iPad app

• 
  
• LinkedIn shareholders sell off even more shares, including CEO Jeff Weiner!
• 
  
• 
  
• Over 1 million jobs in the US are now being advertised on LinkedIn
• 
  

Advertising Update

• 
  
• Following my request last week I have found two examples of successful advertising campaigns. One was a small scale 'sponsored updates' campaign that cost £200 and achieved 25 downloads of a pdf report (I'm not sure I would be happy with that myself). The other involved a considerably greater spend of $25,000 but achieved a massive 1,761% ROI. This was a new membership campaign by the International Coach Federation in the US. The full report can be seen here
• 
  

The State of LinkedIn.

Do LinkedIn have their monetization strategy right?

In this section I talk about one article which puts a case for why LinkedIn are an attractive investment versus another piece that claims quite the opposite!

The second article can be found here but I must warn you that to read the full piece you will be asked to sign up to a variety of things you probably don't want so here is the most interesting bit;

Fundamental weaknesses

Before I get to LinkedIn's strategic failures, let me first point out its operating woes:

LinkedIn squeezed out only 1.6% in operating profits during its last twelve months vs. 5.2% during the twelve months ended at the end of 2Q 2013. To contrast its continued decline in operating margins, Facebook has achieved operating profits of 43% during its last twelve months.

LinkedIn's Premium Subscriptions conversion rate is consistently under .4%. That means that of the 305 million users (average during the 2Q 2014), less than half of a percent convert into purchasing LinkedIn's premium products. Premium subscriptions start out at $23.99 and approach rates of as high as $99.99. Assuming that the average premium subscriber pays $40/month, the conversion rate is an abysmal .29%. If the average user pays $35, the conversion rate would be closer to .33%.

In any case, the conversion rate declines if your assumption uses a higher dollar-per-month figure, which means that ~99.7% of LinkedIn's users see no value in Premium Subscriptions (not to be confused with Job Seeker subscriptions, which fall under Talent Solutions).

LinkedIn continues to spend heavily