According to The Times of London The Wall Street Journal is planning to deliver a LinkedIn-style social network.
So why would The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corporation, consider taking on Linkedin?
Let's consider a few LinkedIn statistics first.
- There are over 200 million LinkedIn users.
- Two new users join LinkedIn every second.
- 64% of LinkedIn users are outside the US.
- 42% of users update their profile regularly.
- 35% of LinkedIn users access the site daily.
- Over 10 million endorsements are given daily.
- 39% of users pay for LinkedIn premium.
- There are 2.7 million LinkedIn business pages.
- There are 1.5 million groups on LinkedIn.
- 81% of LinkedIn users belong to at least one group.
While we don't know a lot about the plans for this LinkedIn-style social network we can look at the assets LinkedIn has and how they might benefit The Wall Street Journal.
- The Journal has a strong reputation that provides confidence to users so people would happily sign up anticipating that other users could provide legitimate business contacts.
- The Journal gets a vast new range of potential readers.
- Big data comes into play here; the network itself is newsworthy (think about how much press Facebook gets), a source of news topics and a delivery platform for news.
- Crowdsourcing stories and news would be easy. Within LinkedIn groups users already share ideas and information so this would easily translate.
- The opportunity to offer advertising alone could pay for the network.
- The Wall Street Journal is known worldwide so there's no doubt that a social space, like LinkedIn, would provide a global presence.
Any newspaper would love to have a social network. It provides an audience, new opportunities for income and a great source of material and data.
Whether or not the move is a good idea takes a back seat to the fact that it's really great to see a traditional content creator thinking of new ways to monetise what they produce.
Interested in learning how you can use LinkedIn or social networks for your business? Tweet us @studioskylab or email us at [email protected].