Social networking is dominated by Facebook and with good reason. It’s undoubtedly the largest and most popular social network in the world. But how does Linkedin compare?
Written by Kaye Neylon
Facebook accounts for a large part of spending on the majority of businesses annual budget. Social ads are used by many companies to direct traffic from Facebook to the offerings on their corporate website.
After Facebook went public earlier in the year in a record shattering IPO (Initial Public Offering) and has been on unsteady ground since as it proves its worth as a publically-traded company to Wall Street.
By comparison, Linkedin would be considered less worthy of attention. The professional social network, as a publically-traded company, is worth more than $10bn (roughly £6bn) with its shares trading at five times more than Facebook’s.
It begs the question, Why are investors so confident when it comes to Linkedin?
Facebook goes to great lengths to prove its ability to profit from its user base of over a billion and meet the great expectations Wall Street set.
What Linkedin has managed to do, which has left Facebook behind eating the dust, is demonstrate how to monetize a professional social network. Facebook has attempted to do this with a consumer social network but this has proved more challenging.
Linkedin has developed its portfolio that cater to both marketers and users alike with Pro Accounts, company pages, polls and analytics all of which are valuable to marketing professionals.
Facebook’s dependence on advertising overshadows Linkedin’s, which accounts for 25% of the company’s annual revenue.
Marketer’s reliance on the measuring tools offered by Linkedin are good reason to believe the company will be able to increase their revenue.
These very tools allow marketers to connect with a large professional audience made up of active and highly influential individuals.
Until recently, marketers were forced to rely on Linkedin’s interface to manage their self-service ad campaigns.
Yesterday, it was announced directly from Linkedin headquarters, that they have partnered with several global companies, including Adobe, Unified Social and Bizo to test trial their news Ads API (Application Programming Interface).
Ads API allows marketers to create and manage Linkedin ad campaigns more effectively on platforms they would normally use across multiple sites.
Linkedin’s proposition was simple enough, if marketers can purchase ads more easily while feeling they have better tracking and reporting of their ad campaign through third-party tools, they are more likely to invest more into their Linkedin campaigns.
Do you use Linkedin as part of your ad strategy? If so, how useful would you find this new tool?
Let us know!
