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LinkedIn Grows 319% to Facebook’s Measly 98% Growth
LinkedIn community evangelist Mario Sundar has posted a chart from Nielsen showing the top social networks and their growth over the past year (March-March). I’ve embedded the chart below. The analysis is based on U.S. home and work traffic and does not include international traffic.
LinkedIn shows growth at 319% while Facebook only grew 98% and MySpace barely grew at 9%. I’d suggest that Facebook and MySpace have the market nearly tapped so their growth will be slower than LinkedIn. Buzznet also grew nicely at 49%.
A year ago the Facebook fans claimed LinkedIn was dead and that Facebook would replace LinkedIn as the business networking tool of choice. I haven’t seen that happen and if anything, I’ve seen more LinkedIn requests than Facebook requests lately. Do you believe Facebook will still replace LinkedIn as the business social network?
Update: Dave Barger said something I think is worth repeating, "More people wokeup to the fact the LinkedIn wasn’t just for JobHunters than Facebook was not just for College kids."
Drama 2.0 also wonders Are the Most LinkedIn Really LinkedOut?
As late as the fall, most people I spoke with thought that Facebook was for college kids and that LinkedIn was for JobHunters. Here’s a question I posed on LinkIn while at a Facebook conference in Seattle in December.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/internet-marketing/MAR_ADP_INM/139912-8834509
I’d love to see the growth and attrition curves on big name SNS, but for now merely assume that MySpace had hit some maturity level where LinkedIn and Facebook are still the newer kids.
Factor-in that maybe people foresaw the professional potential of LI before Facebook. Although, once in many looked around to wonder “what do I do now”.
Answering that call was Jason Alba’s I’m on LinkedIn, Now What? in September 2007.
With Jesse Stay, The Facebook version I’m on Facebook, Now What? came along in February 2008.
All the while, both texts were slightly out of date regarding their respective feature sets as there have been so many new items in the last year. The same holding true for MySpace’s integration of features that other SNS’s already had.
All that said, a year is an enormous amount of time for a comparision. These SNS’s are probably more suited for quarterly.
Thanks for sharing the data (and the Tweet where I learned of the post). If you ever get your hands on some growth curves… you could charge (a little) even a peak at the shape.
I agree with the ‘what do I do now’ angle regarding LinkedIn. At least on Facebook I can message old acquaintances or colleagues that I have no email for. On LinkedIn I’ve run into the ‘this person prefers no contact’ wall.
The focus of LinkedIn will ensure that it maintains its position as the leading business networking tool.
More and more people seem to be open to being contacted via LinkedIn and people also seem to be very responsive to questions asked via LinkedIn.
I recently needed to sign up ad agencies to do a final Beta test for ProofHQ. I sent a request out through linked in with some fairly specific criteria and within a day had the Beta agencies that I needed.
Great info, thanks for posting.
As the saying goes “a rising tide floats all boats”.
Growth for one social network means growth for the industry as a whole.
As a provide of training to business on how to leverage this exciting medium (http://www.SocialMediaMoney.com) I’m glad to hear about any prositive growth.