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Although not as popular or indeed populated as other social networking sites, LinkedIn has long been seen as the more "professional" site to be seen on.
Applications on LinkedIn are few and far between and you certainly don’t wake up to find 15 vaguely related people you once added have thrown sheep at you overnight. Application development on LinkedIn is tightly controlled to ensure that only those that will bring real benefit to the user base are approved and made publicly available. Anyone looking to launch an application has first got to convince LinkedIn there is a need for it.
So if it’s so difficult to get an application approved what's in it for the company developing the application?
Well first of all it’s this tight control that makes having your application on LinkedIn quite an accomplishment. Where there are thousands of Facebook applications, at the time of writing this article LinkedIn had just 10. Out of this 10, many are from illustrious names such as LinkedIn itself, Google, WordPress and Amazon.
Then there’s the somewhat unique demographic of the user base.
LinkedIn users have an average age of just 41, older than many other social networking sites but lower than other leading business sites. In addition to this they are more influential with almost 49% business decision makes:
| Site |
Avg. Age |
% business decision makers |
| LinkedIn |
41 |
49% |
| Forbes.com |
47 |
38% |
| BusinessWeek.com |
48 |
42% |
So if you’re looking to target business users in any shape or form then LinkedIn and in particular LinkedIn Apps are definitely something that should be considered.
To find out more about LinkedIn's demographics, see the full presentation by Erick Schonfeld at Slideshare below.
http://www.slideshare.net/erickschonfeld/linkedin-demographic-data-jun08-presentation
If you'd like to know more about how social media can help you give us a call on 0845 0 347 347 or drop us an email at info@punkyduck.com
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