Why compare between your two friends, when both are doing good for you.
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I was going through an interesting article on www.technorati.com by John Egan about decline of Facebook and Twitter and rise of LinkedIn as favoured networking platform for top business executives. Since I am connoisseur of numbers, I enjoyed the article a lot. He shared some of the interesting figures, which as reproduced below:
1) Twenty percent of the executives – CEOs, vice presidents and others – cited Facebook as a professional network in 2010, compared with 51 percent in 2009.
2) Twitter also experienced a drop in professional networking activity – from 40 percent in 2009 to 33 percent in 2010.
3) Use of Plaxo as a professional network declined from 13 percent in 2009 to 5 percent in 2010, according to the study.
Other findings of the study are:
1) 59 percent of the influential executives used mobile devices to access online professional networks, up from 44 percent in 2009.
2) iPhone / iPod Touch was the most popular mobile device among influential executives (52 percent), followed by BlackBerry (37 percent) and Android (15 percent).
3) 87 percent used search engines as part of their decision-making, compared with 43 percent for company websites.
4) Gaining access to thought leadership was the top reason for accessing online professional networks.
These are very interesting and informative numbers, but I am still not clear that when Facebook and Twitter were professional networking platform? I have been following Facebook and Twitter closely from past two year around and these two platforms never came across to me as professional networking platform. What I could make out from Facebook that it is a great personal networking and organizing platform with simplicity mixed with lots of fun in sharing the feelings and opinions. Participants never came across as planning to gain a thought leadership position on Facebook.
Similarly, my takeaway from Twitter is that it is a communication tool, where participants share their piece of information in just 140 characters, and these small numbers of characters are definitely not sufficient to take a thought leadership position.
As against that, LinkedIn has always been a professional networking platform, giving participants scope to build their profile like their curriculum vitae to display their KRAs and accomplishments, create and join groups, ideate through long prose and establish their credential as a thought leader, and this is precisely what any senior business executive would want. Further, since people have been flocking LinkedIn for professional purpose owing to branding and mindset, it has become biggest professional platform and allows them to find out relevant business contacts and network for better business efficiency and result.
So, I don’t see any reason to any reason to sit down and do a critical analysis of who is leaving what and joining what. For a marketer, everybody, at all the networking platform, is mass of niches. For them, it is important to know user’s profile of different networking platform, so to make the relevant strategy, but it is not at all important to study the reason of migration from on platform to another. Facebook is gaining ground very fast in India, but can we ignore the presence of Orkut. If anybody does that, I think he or she will be doing it for their own peril. For a marketer, it is important to be pervasive than being paranoid about migration of users from one platform to another.
Aren't you mistaken when you say Facebook is not able to provide a professional networking site. My hunch is the following. Both Facebook and Linkedin has technologically all the relevant tools which can be used for communication. It is just the branding attitude which differs. Nevertheless, I can use facebook account to search people who does my kind of work and then contact them. For example, for one of my project, I searched freelancers using facebook and orkut. I closely followed their profile, either on Linked-in, or in facebook, or in orkut. Then I decided whom to contact. They did wonderful job. Only problem with Linkedin I find is the difference between paid and free contents, i.e. premium membership and free membership. It is this tool which filters unwanted connection, but their is no difference as far as capability is concerned.
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteThanks for leaving your valuable input. I really appreciate.There is no question of being mistaken. If there is more than 600 million user of any networking platform, then, number one, it is quite possible to find person of your relevance there, and number two, the the mass of people with varied interest can be segmented and organized into various groups for professional purpose and that's why we see so many pages of business organizations and brands. But, may be due to branding, Facebook comes across as personal networking tool, where the focus is more on sharing personal matter. Here, you have put an effort to filter your contact and segment into different categories.
As against that, LinkedIn is purely a networking platform for professionals. It automatically filter and organizes your contacts in different group, which makes networking exercise easy. Since the focus here is completely unidirectional and i.e, business and profession, your effort gets minimized.
But, most important of all, I agree with you completely and I have also tried to emphasize upon , is the use of all the networking platforms for the purpose, you intent to, be it professional or personal. If we pool together the users of different networking platforms, it will definitely overtake China at least in population. I don't have the exact number of users on all networking sites. And one can deep dive and pick out the person of their relevance and this is what we marketers should be interested about, rather than focusing on who is migrating from one platform to another.