Will integration save Linkedin?

I was at a PRCA event last week run by Cristina Hoole, European PR and Marketing manager at Linkedin.

The problem with Linkedin

I’ve always been a bit confused by Linkedin. I can see the potential benefits, but just can’t bring myself to make it a major part of my everyday working life. My profile is kept updated. I often add new contacts. And I’ll use it to look people up. But I just don’t use the site on a regular basis.

Having said that, Linkedin isn’t failing – Hoole reported 50 million users worldwide and 3 million here in the UK – but I wonder how many of these actually visit the site every single day, as they would with Twitter or Facebook?

Linkedin is great for linking together your business community, but it doesn’t have that everyday application that other networks have. This is potentially a problem: two of three of its revenue sources – advertising and premium accounts – are mainly focused ‘on-site’ (the third being software packages for recruitment agents).

Linkedin Outlook Integration

But Cristina revealed an interesting new feature for Linkedin – Outlook Integration. And it makes total sense.

Where do most ‘business people’ spend most of their time? In Outlook.

Outlook integration therefore seems like a great idea. I now don’t need to visit the Linkedin site every single day, but I can still harness the usefulness of the tool through Outlook – something I use for long stretches of time every single day. Obviously monetising this will be a challenge, but at least it could begin to make Linkedin an everyday, business critical tool.

Twitter has had unbelievable success with third party applications and increasingly Facebook is entering and finding traction here. As we start using more and more networks, bringing together more and more friends and followers, these third party apps are crucial to helping us keep on top of everything.

And I think this could be the key to future success for Linkedin too.

Footnote…

I actually wrote most of this post last week, but only got round to finishing now. And, by sheer coincidence, Linkedin has today announced a brand new API for third party developers. Tweetdeck is reportedly releasing an integration later this week.

Could there possibly be ray of sunshine round the corner for Linkedin?

picture credit

Danny Whatmough