What does the future hold for LinkedIn? The market has been pondering this question since LinkedIn's IPO this year. LinkedIn has thrived under the current economic conditions, with high unemployment rates and a surge in the number of people looking for jobs. The networking and job search features on LinkedIn are essential to anyone who is looking for a job in the current economic conditions. As new people sign up, they often spend additional time building up their profile, updating their experience, building up their network and simply finding out what LinkedIn has to offer.
Over time, the key to LinkedIn is to keep people coming back even when they are not unemployed, graduaing from college or looking for a career transition. To this end, LinkedIn has been rapidly expanding the professional networking and features on its website, in order to expand the value proposition it offers to its users. The expanding number of professional groups on LinkedIn is expanding the possibility for LinkedIn to become the center of future online professional exchange and seminars. This expands the role of LinkedIn beyond just networking for jobs. It provide a forum for ideas, solutions, information exchange and discussions. In addition, LinkedIn has started incroporating business news and industry news into the user home page to provide relevant and interesting news based on user profile.
LinkedIn members can also integrate their LinkedIn accounts with other applications or networks that can be used to benefit LinkedIn member's profile. This includes links to twitter accounts, word press blogs, huddle online workplace collaboration, project management tools, slideshare presentation tools, e-bookshelf, box.net for online file storage, and portfolio display. These tools add to the value to LinkedIn accounts and can eventually provide opportunities to do work collaboration and discussion online in a professional context. The goal is to increase the amount of time users spend on LinkedIn for non job search and networking related functions.
Lastly, LinkedIn also provides premium accounts for users. These premium accounts provide additional networking functionality and visibility. It also provides premium accounts for recruiters and companies who use LinkedIn for human resource recruiting purposes. These premium accounts provide additional revenues for LinkedIn to supplement advertising revenue. The business model of LinkedIn based on job search and networking also has the potential for generating a higher percentage of premium accounts compared to free accounts than other companies using the freemium model because it provides a potential direct financial benefit for the user - finding a new job or finding the right workers.
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