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LinkedIn Needs to Convince Users to Spend More Time on Its Site

While LinkedIn reported that it had an impressive 53.6 million users at the end of November 2009, the number pales in comparison to Facebook, which has more than 350 million members.

LinkedIn is a social networking site that is geared toward professionals and is mostly used to post resumes and recruit talent.  However, LinkedIn’s chief executive, Jeff Weiner, is looking for ways to get people to spend more time on the site.   According to the research firm, comScore, users spent an average of 13 minutes on LinkedIn last October, while Facebook users logged approximately 213 minutes.

As a way to encourage LinkedIn users to visit the site more often, Weiner has opened up the site to third-party developers to design applications that will attract professional users when they aren’t necessarily looking for work. A stipulation of these apps is that they have to be professionally oriented.  One software developer, SAP AG, has already jumped on this opportunity and has created an application that allows SAP developers to emphasize their credentials by adding a badge to their profiles on LinkedIn.  A partnership has also been made with Twitter that will allow LinkedIn users to link their Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles.

According to Mr. Weiner, “the more relevant those experiences the more likely our membership will be to engage those experiences.” He went on to say that LinkedIn has already had requests from 1,5000 developers.

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