LinkedIn (LNKD, Financial) is seeing impressive growth in member engagement. This helped it deliver strong results in the first quarter. LinkedIn is now focusing on several aspects to improve its profitability. It is making moves in key dimensions such as international expansion, professional publishing and a shift to content marketing. As a result, investors can expect LinkedIn to continue growing at a fast pace.
Strong member engagement is LinkedIn's key growth driver. The fantastic 46% growth in revenue in the previous quarter, driven by 36% cumulative growth in membership is a clear indicator of the company’s operational excellence. Its accelerated efforts in product innovation is another positive, leading to an increase in engagement per visiting member by more than 40%.
More growth in the cards
LinkedIn is expecting better results from the mobile segment as mobile is the fastest-growing channel for member engagement. It has seen a tremendous increase in the customer base, which grew nearly threefold in the first quarter. As mobile traffic can account for half of the total traffic later this year, LinkedIn is gearing up to tap this market. It is focusing on mobilizing technology infrastructure, engineering team and products, which are one of LinkedIn’s most important priorities as of now.
LinkedIn is also making moves to make profiles more attractive. As its profiles have become the standard way for millions of people to build and maintain their professional identities, it becomes necessary for the company to introduce exciting features to maintain user engagement. Profile completion is an important aspect for LinkedIn. For example, profiles with photos generate 14 times more views than those without. Therefore, profile completeness is an ongoing priority for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has also made some exciting additions to its offerings such as with the launch of Who Viewed My Profile. This new addition gives users more intelligence to build their professional profiles. Another appreciated move by LinkedIn was the launch of its beta site in simplified Chinese. With this move, it aims at broadening the member base by tapping 140 million professionals and students in China.
Innovations to drive growth
In February, under its exclusive influencer program, LinkedIn announced that its professional publishing platform enabled any member to publish long form content. This feature helps users to more finitely define their professional identity so that it gives a closer insight. With this, LinkedIn aims at bringing the right content in front of the right professionals at the right time.
This has turned out to be beneficial for LinkedIn as it saw more than six times the projected uptake of the functionality. These are some impressive efforts by LinkedIn to create value for its customers. These efforts have enabled LinkedIn to deliver useful offerings to customers of its Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions and Premium Subscriptions products.
It has launched the enhanced version of Recruiter for iPhone on Recruiter on Android, which is slowly gaining steam. LinkedIn is focusing on some core strategies, under which it is aiming to materially increase the volume of job opportunities available on it. It solely aims at improving the relevance of those opportunities for its members, which suits their requirements.
LinkedIn has also launched an internal job recommendation, giving recruiters a better way to identify and attract some of the best candidates and the existing employees who are looking for new challenges or career advancements. LinkedIn has strengthened this initiative with the acquisition of Bright.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is shifting toward content marketing. This has helped the company to post a solid 19% increase from the last quarter. As LinkedIn is working on various initiatives to improve and innovate the overall experience, it is seeing an increase in customer retention, which can be seen by increased renewals last year. This included more than 3,000 active customers running the Sponsored Update campaign.
So, on the back of its innovative moves and increasing user engagement, LinkedIn looks like a solid bet.
