LinkedIn Seeks Enhanced Customer Engagement via High Value, High Impact Initiatives

While there were many positives surrounding LinkedIn’s fiscal fourth-quarter conference call on Feb. 4, the reality is the company’s shares dropped nearly 30% amid muted guidance for 2016. But LinkedIn CEO Jeffrey Weiner noted that the company plans to focus on high-value, high impact initiatives to spark enhanced customer engagement.

During the call, company officials said it would end Lead Accelerator, a B2B lead-nurturing product that arrived via an acquisition of Bizo, due to a larger than expected allotment of resources.

The company posted a loss of $8.4 million during the fourth quarter. What’s more, during the three-month period, product-development spending rose to $217.3 million, up from $150.3 million. Fourth-quarter revenue increased 34%, to $862 million.

“Q4 was a strong quarter for LinkedIn, bringing to a close a successful year of growth and innovation against our long-term roadmap,” Weiner said, according to Seeking Alpha.

During the fourth quarter, cumulative members grew 19%, to 414 million; unique visiting members grew 7% to an average of 100 million per month; and member page views rose 26%. This yielded 17% year-over-year growth in page views per unique visiting member, continuing a pattern of strong engagement growth over the past several quarters.

“Mobile, in particular, grew three times faster than overall member activity, and now represents 57% of all traffic to LinkedIn,” Weiner added. “In 2015, we organized our long-term product strategy around the principle of creating greater value for our members and our customers, connecting them to opportunity. Central to this strategy is to help members stay connected and informed, advance their careers, and work smarter.”

In December, LinkedIn launched its re-imagined flagship app, built with the goal to help members stay connected and informed through a simpler, faster, and more personalized experience.

“The new app is an entirely new member platform, on which our R&D teams can iterate faster and test new features continuously,” Weiner said. “It is at the core of our member value strategy. The new flagship app includes all of our core functionality, with the Feed at the center. While still early, in January we are seeing meaningful acceleration across several key metrics including Feed engagement, searches, and messages sent. The result is the fastest year-over-year growth we’ve seen in five months.”

The early accelerated traffic trends are particularly noteworthy, Weiner said, given the company’s 2015 emphasis on quality versus quantity of email sent by LinkedIn to members.

“We have reduced the number of emails sent on a per member basis by 40%, a worthwhile trade-off aligned with our long-term strategy to create the best possible member experience,” Weiner said. “Another key member investment throughout 2015 has been to help members advance their careers. As of January, we've more than doubled the number of jobs on LinkedIn versus last year, to more than six million open listings. Even more encouraging is the acceleration in members leveraging LinkedIn to find career opportunities. Through improved discovery in our flagship and Job Seeker apps, as well as better relevance, we've seen a material increase in jobs engagement on LinkedIn, from approximately 30% year-over-year growth last January to over 80% growth today. In addition, our jobs app has seen traffic increase approximately six times from a year ago. And most importantly, we're driving a greater volume of hiring by our customers.”

By providing greater member value, Weiner said, LinkedIn can continue to focus on “helping our customers work smarter when they hire, market, and sell by leveraging our three diverse product lines – Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, and Premium Subs, which today includes Sales Solutions.”

In 2016, Weiner noted three priorities for LinkedIn’s core hiring products.

“First, we’ll roll-out new Recruiter and Referrals across our existing customer base,” he said. “Second, we will tie our existing products together into an easy to use suite, growing our potential to impact greater amounts of hiring with existing customers. And third, we’ll begin our journey toward addressing long-tail hiring by making Recruiter simpler to use, and introducing automated sourcing to help SMBs and hiring managers find and acquire talent.”
 

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