In Search of Stickiness
Saturday, April 29th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
Some web services have stickiness, others don’t. The first will draw users to make use of the service on a regular and voluntary (pull) basis. The second will get infrequent use, most of the time in response to external requests (push). If two services compete for the same audience, the one with the higher level of stickiness eventually wins against the other. This is especially true for services that rely on Metcalfe’s law in order to deliver value to their users, chiefs among them social networking services.
A relative of mine recently went to work for Facebook, and discussing with him gave me an opportunity to better understand what makes this social networking service much more successful than LinkedIn, of which I am a fanatical user. On one hand, and according to Michael Arrington, 85% of all college students use Facebook, and 70% of them log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month. That’s what I call stickiness. On the other hand, it is very likely that the very vast majority of LinkedIn members never log in more than once or twice after they created their account in response to an invitation from a regular user. As explained in this earlier post, most LinkedIn members are not active users, mainly because LinkedIn does not offer them any services they would get value from on a daily basis.
The main reason why Facebook is demonstrating so much more stickiness is because, unlike LinkedIn, it offers something of value to its users: groups, with very basic yet extremely useful features such as file sharing and message boards. Granted, Facebook and LinkedIn target very different users, therefore should offer different services, or at least package them in different ways. But the same is true for Facebook and MySpace, and I reckon that both are successful for the very same reason: stickiness as a result of daily usefulness.
For LinkedIn to increase its stickiness, it must support groups with similar features targeted at corporate users. What does such a thing look like? CollectiveX, which I presented two months ago. If both companies were to merge, they would create a corporate equivalent to Facebook, which I reckon could be quite useful to its users and quite valuable to its investors.
Entry filed under: Social Networking
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I seriously wonder how succesfull Facebook will be in their corporate effort.
THAT would be a more realistic comparison to LinkedIn.
I know people who are MySpace (or other social network) sticky users. They use it for e-mail, blogging, maintaining an online identity. If you want to understand MySpace pageviews, you need to consider how many of those are send/receive e-mail, upload photo, change profile, write a post. Most of their traffic boils down to that.
I’m one of those people who rarely logs to LinkedIn. Some of my connections are people I don’t talk to much, others are my co-workers. I estimate that on average I exchange 1,000 e-mails a year per connection. That’s 1000x more traffic LinkedIn could get if I was using them the same way people use MySpace. In fact, much more if the company website was a LinkedIn profile, if we uploaded product screenshots and docs the way people upload photos to their MySpace account.
But would businesses do any of that? Is there a need out there to outsource your e-mail, company website, and company blog to a social network?
Assaf,
I do think so, at least for part of it. If someone where to merge the functionality offered by Gmail, Google Calendar, CollectiveX, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com, you would have a platform that most businesses could use as an alternative to desktop office productivity suites. Let’s see how long it takes before this happens.
Zoli,
I agree. 1,000 corporations have been invited. Let’s see how it goes.
It’s only a matter of time before someone does a unified service, so let’s assume it exists. But it’s not alone, success breeds competition. Say you have two/three big ones dominating the portion of the market that decides to outsource these services.
You can limit your pool of connections to only those people using the same service provider as you do. Or go back to using a network that cuts across service providers, just like LinkedIn is today.
The MySpace model doesn’t translate to LinkedIn. Business users want to have less vendors to deal with, centralize as much as possible, get the best service for their money. Features above network.
The MySpace story is different. Here the value is the network, quality of service and features matter less (those who used MySpace may say ‘matter none’). On the other hand, MySpace users can belong to multiple networks, use different e-mail and IM addresses, etc. MySpace is not their only service provider, just the one where network effect translates into stickiness.
So I don’t see LinkedIn ever being able to match MySpace or Facebook. You can’t stretch the network wide enough as a service provider, and you can’t get sticky without being a service provider.
Assaf,
I can see your point, but I’m not sure that I get the conclusion. Do you mean that you won’t use LinkedIn anymore? Or is it that you’ll just use it for limited networking tasks and do not expect it to grow much beyond what it is today?
I don’t expect the MySpace/Facebook principles to translate to LinkedIn. I can see a business social network getting massive reach of contacts, if they play their cards right, but not how it translates to 100x page views, because the dynamics are so different.
I’m also not convienced it matters. They can charge for adding better features, where MySpace relies on ads.
As for me, I accept invitations but don’t initiate them. I need one place to hold all my contacts and LinkedIn is not it. And I’m not getting enough immediate value to bother to synchronize my real contact list with my LinkedIn account.
Assaf,
That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
[…] LinkedIn: This one defined the space for professional networking early on, then was copied and improved upon by OpenBC, later renamed Xing. It grew to a high-quality network rich of 9 million users, and should cross the bar of 10 million sometime in Q1 or early Q2 this year. Problem is, it’s not very sticky, in the sense that it does not provide any incentive for users to login on a regular basis, like they would with Facebook or MySpace, unless you happen to be a recruiter. My personal belief is that LinkedIn is sitting on a phenomenal untapped potential, which will be realized only when it adds group management features similar to what Xing has been developing all along. I just have no idea when this will happen though. In the meantime, you cannot really use LinkedIn to manage your contacts on its own, for it does not allow you to add information to contacts directly. Instead, it’s a very good companion to Microsoft Outlook as a way to create new connections, or lookup the last working email address for a contact who recently switched jobs. If you’re not using Microsoft Outlook, synchronization with your contact management application has to be done manually, which is a royal pain. I have been asking LinkedIn Corporation to add the LinkedIn unique ID to their standard CSV export about a gazillion times over the past two years, but have failed miserably so far. Note to Reid: please… […]
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