Downturn helps LinkedIn growth

Not so long ago, I questioned the decreasing relevancy of LinkedIn in a Facebook world, but I think the recent downturn works in favor of this highly popular professional networking site. Given that folks are most likely to update their profiles when they are in career transition, it isn’t surprising to see a flurry of activity following the recent round of layoffs.

According to Compete.com, unique visitors to the site has gone up by nearly 182%, while the number of visits has gone up by 205% since last  year. As recent as last month, unique visits went up by 10%. It looks like the site is seeing a good uptick in user traffic and increasing user engagement during this downturn.

It’s challenging to add new interesting and enagaging features to a professional site, while social sites can load up on the cutesy features much more easily but I think LinkedIn is definitely going about it the right way.

I especially liked the introduction of ‘Companies’ (still in beta), which is very interesting and relevant for jobseekers. However, it’s still clunky and needs refining to make it easier to navigate. ’Answers’ and ’Groups’ add more stickiness to the site, but I think the site could benefit from more career-related rich content.

It’s about the only credible professional site out there so that definitely helps its popularity, but UGC can only take you so far. Adding more relevant career-related content may get the users to keep coming back even when the economy is not in a downturn.