What is the reason for LinkedIn's success?

Accurate positioning and excellent data collation are the reasons for the ultimate success of LinkedIn. Chinese imitators need to imitate the genetic plane to be hopeful.

In December 2010, secondmarket, the U.S. unlisted stock trading platform, picked out five unlisted companies valued at $1 billion trillion, and LinkedIn squeezed out YouTube and other popular listings.

LinkedIn, an old social-networking site earlier than Facebook, has been sneaking around in the 10-year internet boom with a low-key, steady-content posture.

January 27, 2011, LinkedIn submitted a listing application. The initial disclosure of operations shows that its 2010 1-September revenue reached $161 million trillion. In 2010, LinkedIn finally made its full-year profit and announced March 22 this year that its registered users were up to 100 million, with an average of one user registered per second. You know, unlike Facebook, these 100 million users are the pyramid-tipped people in the business world.

However, whether it is the heyday of Facebook, Twitter, or the once brilliant MySpace, Bebo,linkedin and their content is too "social".

What is the reason for LinkedIn to reach its current height?

Correct positioning of the front end

At Stanford, the chairman of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, was interested in how to improve people's social relationships with ecosystems. He ended up working for Apple and Fujitsu, creating a social networking site socialnet for the first time. He was persuaded to join PayPal, founded by Stanford alumni Peter Thiel, at a time of difficulty in socialnet development.

When PayPal was sold to ebay in 2002, ending the IPO dotcom bubble, Hoffman and his partners had enough to support other good entrepreneurs. PayPal's CEO, Peter Thiel, is one of Facebook's first investors, while Hoffman has invested in Zynga, Digg, Last.fm and other later companies.

Unlike other start-up partners, Hoffman, after selling PayPal, was eager to pick up the dream-to start LinkedIn in late 2002, the first company the former PayPal employee founded.

Hoffman believes that in the traditional scenario of recruiting and seeking jobs, there is often a single channel flow of information between a job seeker and a recruiting company. In this information circulation link, the job seeker resume and company's self-introduction is often the other party's only source of information.

Obviously, this kind of single access information content is very limited, even if both sides publish the information is true, also cannot form the accurate judgment to the other party.

Hoffman that, in the workplace, individual brands (LinkedIn's local competition website naymz.com directly on the home page to "build and protect your personal brand") is more important than a resume, and brand value often comes from the recommendation and evaluation of others, namely "with whom."

As a result, Hoffman's positioning for LinkedIn is the real-name high-end social networking site.

However, the positioning means that LinkedIn will be significantly different from the entertainment-oriented SNS that can rapidly boost traffic. LinkedIn lacks the entertainment element, even lacks the sharing and the interaction, the user maintains the obvious distance feeling.

This makes the first challenge for LinkedIn is how to reach millions of users, because only the number of users to reach this level, so that a SNS information search and share the value of the embodiment. However, in all SNS, it may be the slowest growing popularity. Initially, LinkedIn took 477 days to get 1 million users, and 3.5 of the time (end of 2006) reached 10 million users. In the meantime, MySpace and Facebook have become new stars in the internet industry.

There have been many questions about LinkedIn's indifference and slow response to the popularity of the Internet. In fact, if the human-centred "carbon-based" internet era is characterized by the full flow and sharing of information on human-made nodes, LinkedIn is an alternative representative of the "carbon-based".

LinkedIn is a weak interaction compared to the strong interaction between Facebook and Twitter. But the weak interaction with the color of "circle culture" is its unique value. For LinkedIn users, it's pointless to log in every day, but only to show that the person is not working.

SNS based on interpersonal relationship is a natural recruiting market. In fact, LinkedIn, a special type of SNS, solves neither the Facebook bubble nor the bubble, nor the Twitter-like look and see, but the problem of hunting and hunting. This new scenario determines that there is no need for a party in LinkedIn, no virtual gifts, and that strict--linkedin with false, redundant information is not intended to become social, and it even allows users to upload avatars in 2008 years.

In fact, LinkedIn not only does not entertain, but also through screening and defense mechanisms, strictly control the interaction of interpersonal relationships to protect the information gold.

For example, it has strict restrictions on users in the station to send information, the basic account can be sent in the station is very limited, often tell you to send more site invitations to pay to upgrade the account, or you can only through the two sides have a direct contact between the intermediary to forward the contact invitation.

Also, the system will ask you to indicate the type of contact, including "colleagues", "classmate", "Business Contacts", "Friends" and "Strangers" and several other options. If your resume and your resume do not show that you are a colleague or classmate, the system will ask you to add the appropriate work and learning experience. After receiving the invitation, the user can take three actions: "Accept", "archive" or mark "I don't know this person".

Real-name, high-end social and weak interaction (that is, limited sharing), these three are the front-end reasons for the success of LinkedIn. These three positions ensure that LinkedIn can precipitate the most commercially valuable part of the real world's social relationship and dig it up as a data gold mine.

Deep finishing in the background

On the 2011 New Year's Day, every registered user of LinkedIn receives a system email informing him of who he has met through LinkedIn over the past 1 years, the changes in his circle of friends, and the major changes in his industry. This seemingly simple email, behind this is not just the size of the company's massive data capabilities, but also a means of directing users--giving you a better idea of what to do with LinkedIn, and to better manage your own personal brand, to provide more content and more valuable interaction.

But not every real-name high-end SNS can do as well as LinkedIn.

Closest to LinkedIn, Viadeo, founded in 2004 in France, has 35 million users, as well as xing.com, which is listed on the German mainland. The biggest difference between them and LinkedIn is the ability to organize user data in depth.

SNS based on real name can be created more business value, which has become a consensus in the present. And the most important difference between business social class and traditional recruiting website is that the former information can provide index for search engine, and then create the space of SEO optimization.

Reid Hoffman His view of the Web 3.0 on the theme "How entrepreneurs Create the Future" at the recently concluded south-West Interactive discussion (SXSW). He thinks the mobile platform is certainly the trend of Web 3.0, but the data is the key to the next round of Internet industry opportunities. In his view, Web 1.0 is "Search, find information data", Web 2.0 is "Real user identity" and "real social relationship", and Web 3.0 will be "the user's real identity and the amount of data generated by the relationship".

Although the same is the real-name high-end SNS, but LinkedIn's data collation algorithms, systems and organizational shape of the brewing level, much higher than its competitors. This, from the company's exclusive brand-building three-dimensional coordinates-experience, relationships and skills-innovation, it can be seen:

April 2010, LinkedIn bid farewell to the personal brand of a single strategic thinking, launched the enterprise file. Companies can also create and manage "career labels" on their web pages to provide visitors and potential job seekers with an opportunity to learn more about their employment history. Job seekers can use this to know what employees in a company have done before entering the job. On LinkedIn, for example, Google's files include a lot of this data, so it's easy to track how many Google employees are currently moving to Facebook. In addition, for a long time, insiders generally believe that LinkedIn has nothing to do with students who have no work experience. But LinkedIn recently launched a dour Explorer app designed for college students to track the careers of the elder sister.

In the relationship dimension, in January, LinkedIn launched a stunning tool called Inmaps in its lab products. It's a visualization tool that lets you show all your relationships in LinkedIn through different colors of dots and lines, so you can look for better job opportunities, career development advice, in-depth information, and more.

In the "Skills" dimension, in February, LinkedIn released a product--linkedin Skills about "skills" data. Users can retrieve users on a Web site based on a skill, and can also make advanced searches with other information such as geographic location. In addition, LinkedIn lists some of the most popular skills and the cities where some of the best masters of the skills are located.

Today, the contacts that LinkedIn recommends to users are already quite accurate, and it can help a user easily find a link to a company or person (such as an interviewer who is about to interview you), and can even automatically display differentiated content based on a different browsing membership.

With background depth data collation and SEO optimization, LinkedIn has actually achieved the most valuable six-degree division among the population.

LinkedIn knows that he is not omnipotent. As a result, it recently launched the LinkedIn Answers, modeled on Yahoo Answers and Quora, to help users further realize the value-added of the brand.

Although there are no games and dates, LinkedIn's powerful data-sorting and optimization is the best way to maintain its internal ecology. The most obvious proof is that LinkedIn is reassuring to encourage users to establish contact with their own use of mail contact, which is diametrically opposed to other SNS-other SNS are trying to develop their own IM and mail system, for fear of users into the QQ and other third-party platforms.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner told the outside world that, like the Facebook platform, there would soon be a good entrepreneur based on the LinkedIn platform.

A guide to Chinese imitators

America's online recruiting market is already quite clear, with high-end major markets being dominated by LinkedIn, and at the lower end belonging to Craigslist and monster. And there is no clear market segment on the Chinese market.

In fact, the Chinese market was born a few years ago, such as the sky, neighbors, people and network of LinkedIn imitators, but their problems are more prominent.

Yi Long Network Vice President Shei Shen is a lot of high-end business SNS senior users. He told business value that LinkedIn sites require rigorous auditing and long-term product build-up to break out. However, these sites in China tend to accumulate users quickly, often make the sale of insurance to users, push to the user's mailbox "you and these people match" with the nature of the information and other acts of harassment. In Shei Shen's view, the success of LinkedIn, in fact, can be simply summed up in the "find out, should not be found not to harass."

In fact, the long-term accumulation of LinkedIn, slow growth of patience, is precisely the domestic ubiquitous "fast copy mode" of the Replicators are the most lacking. Eager to expand in order to become China's LinkedIn, the community is often diluted by rapid water flooding, and because of the real pressure to survive, they are often eager to accumulate networking as a means of marketing, which is clearly contrary to the "High-value Limited interaction" features of high-end social networking sites, So in the end China did not appear to have succeeded in imitating LinkedIn.

At the beginning of 2011, there is a new SNS trend in China, the goal is all positioned in the high-end social networking. For example, Renren and Zhaopin have set up another high-end business sns--Jingwei Network, intending to build a social networking site based on "Trust + sharing".

The network fully emulated LinkedIn's three-degree relationship level and was born with a large number of features, emphasizing personal privacy and rising to the "top priority" level. It claims to provide detailed privacy management options for each user's information sharing, each profile information, and to ensure that only appropriate trust-related personnel can see the appropriate information. At this point, the network and LinkedIn seem to have different ideas.

In fact, unlike Facebook, privacy protection is not a feature of high-end SNS such as LinkedIn, because it is not a business negotiation or a place to store personal privacy. Based on the purpose of "hunting and being hunted", the information that users display on LinkedIn is intended to be seen by the contact, and they use LinkedIn even for this purpose, but they need to rank the contacts in order to reflect their brand value.

At the end of last year, LinkedIn opened the group function, and users outside the station could search for group information. If you are a public group, you can view the discussion within a group, even if it is not a group member, and you can also share group discussions with Twitter and Facebook.

In fact, the true essence of LinkedIn's success is not just the front-end real-name, privacy, and "weak interaction", but also the understanding and effective organization of data, algorithms and interpersonal relationships at the back end.

Since the end of 2009, LinkedIn has published an average of a new feature (or tool) every month. Overall, LinkedIn has started to add, but LinkedIn's change was done after the front-end and backstage, and it still hasn't loosened the back-end technology and algorithms. LinkedIn's listing application showed that its 2010-year sales and market-cost investment accounted for less than 24% of its revenue, while product development exceeded 27%.

Therefore, if the domestic families want to really layout high-end business SNS, I am afraid to start from the genetic aspect of LinkedIn, rather than just form imitation.