Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific
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August 08, 2007
Facebook and LinkedIn: The Line between Social and Professional Networking
While the sharp increase of Facebook in the Australian market is of extreme interest - the social networking utility moved into the top 20 websites visited in All Categories w/ending 28 July 2007 - the referral traffic between Facebook and LinkedIn, a tool for managing professional relationships, gives further insight into the scope of networking activity on Facebook.
Firstly - a chart tracking the growth of Facebook against MySpace and Bebo, where you’ll see that Facebook overtook Bebo for the first time in July 07:
In this chart here you'll see LinkedIn's downstream website traffic to Facebook increasing dramatically in the past quarter. In contrast, LinkedIn's referrals to MySpace and Bebo have either trended down or remained stagnant.
From this chart, I would begin to speculate that users are a) looking-up the professional details of friends and acquaintances from Facebook on LinkedIn or b) business-oriented in visiting both networks concurrently. I wouldn't go so far as to back up this BusinessWeek article which speculates that users could soon replace LinkedIn entirely with Facebook; Hitwise Clickstream data also indicates an increasing amount of traffic in the opposite direction from Facebook to LinkedIn.
Hitwise Demographics data lends some evidence to the argument that business users are accessing both networks. The bubble chart below shows in the top right-hand quadrant that LinkedIn and Facebook are both highly-indexed in the Mosaic Group A - Leading Lifestyles, the wealthiest segment online, and Group D - Fashionably Wired, who are young affluent singles and sharers enjoying city life. The size of the bubble indicates the likelihood of the group being comprised of professionals; the highest groups being Fashionably Wired with an index of 175 and Leading Lifestyles with 171.
Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 12:30 PM
Posted to Networking
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Comments
I have tried myspace and facebook but every profile is of a 23 year old doing jello shots of someone abs...this is networking for professionals? Dont drink the koolaid. I have only seen 2 sites that have real professionls that you would actually want to contact. There is a site called linkedin and a site called congoo. Both those sites have some high quality executive profiles.
Posted by: Rachel at August 12, 2007 01:58 AM
One has to wonder if the largest ever online marketing course www.thirtydaychallenge.com/blog by Australian Ed Dale, which kicked off in July and uses facebook as a networking vehicle had anything to do with the sharp increase in Australia.
Posted by: David at August 14, 2007 08:18 AM
Facebook is still limited as a professional networking tool in my opinion. It may be useful as a means of finding out personal information about professional contacts but its still very much geared towards the younger demographic and social applications.
Posted by: Daniel Young at August 28, 2007 05:21 PM
Sandra, I really liked the Bubble Chart that you included. Any chance that Hitwise might start offering customized, enhanced graphics like this (rather than exporting to Excel)?
Posted by: Mark Poklar at September 22, 2007 12:20 AM
Thanks Mark - will submit your feedback to the product team
Posted by: Sandra Hanchard at September 24, 2007 10:47 AM
