LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner wants to transform his company’s member experience, injecting new energy behind the ultimate goal of greater customer engagement and brand loyalty.
“Connecting our members to relevant news, knowledge, and skills is another strategic priority integral to transforming the member experience,” Weiner said during the company’s first-quarter earnings conference call on April 30, according to Seeking Alpha. “It is our goal to have all of the world’s professionally relevant news and knowledge accessible through LinkedIn. We saw continued strong adoption of our long form posting capabilities in Q1. Thanks in part to the redesign of the home page, this month we experienced our first week with more than 100,000 member-generated long form posts.”
LinkedIn’s overall sales grew 35%, to $638 million during the first quarter.
“Our platform continued to show strong engagement powered by ongoing investments in mobile, global expansion content, and jobs,” Weiner explained.
During the quarter, unique visiting members grew 18% to an average of 97 million per month and member page views grew 30%, well ahead of unique member growth.
“We continue to see a healthy increase in member page views per unique visiting member demonstrating growing organic engagement,” Weiner said. “In addition, mobile continues to grow at double the rate of overall member activity and now represents more than half of all traffic to LinkedIn.”
LinkedIn's value proposition is simple, Weiner explained.
“Connect to opportunity,” he said. “For our members, we do this in three ways. First, connect them to their professional world. Second, keep them informed through professional news and knowledge. And third, help them get hired and build their careers. Our long-term investments in these areas are designed with one goal in mind, transform the member experience to increase the value delivered to each professional on LinkedIn.”
LinkedIn’s new layout simplifies content creation engagement leading to richer conversations, according to Weiner.
LinkedIn’s pending acquisition of Lynda.com announced in April represents one of the company’s most transformational opportunities, Weiner said.
“Lynda.com offers a high quality library of hundreds of thousands of professional training videos and full courses,” he explained. “Millions of people have used Lynda.com to easily and effectively acquire a skill needed to advance their careers. The ability to easily acquire skills through LinkedIn has implications across everything we do. When matched with our data about jobs and skills, we believe we can take a major step toward building the economic graph.”
Eventually, he added, Lynda.com training videos will be integrated into the company’s platform and premium offerings where appropriate.