iUS Stocks: Linkedin social network research – the victory of precise data system

Background: The era of "big data" - the dividends of the SNS era
This year's Davos Forum released a report titled "big data, big impact". One of the characteristics of the "big data era" is the exponential growth of data; another more important characteristic is that the data types are numerous and complex. IDC's report said that global data grows by 50% every year. Moore's Law has already explained this problem from another perspective, which is not surprising. The emergence of complex data is the essence of "big data". In the past information transmission, in addition to the IP address, time, URL, browser used and other structural data that are easy to be processed by computer software, more dynamic pages, relationship networks, comments, texts, videos, stay time, pictures, locations, actions of adding to shopping carts, etc., which do not exist in a two-dimensional standard format, are generated. These are so-called "unstructured data", which are usually not used by traditional databases, and their analysis is becoming increasingly complex.

Looking at the attributes of unstructured data, every point hits the key points of SNS. The relationship network radiates from the self-centeredness; the customized dynamic page based on self-information; the personal behavior derived from comments, dwell time, location, and text. In the Internet era where massive data is rampant, these precise data convey the most accurate personal preferences and are bound to become a place of social disputes. Wall Street sells stocks based on public sentiment; banks infer employment rates based on job search websites; investment institutions collect statements from listed companies to find clues of bankruptcy; the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzes the spread of global influenza and other epidemics based on netizens' searches; Obama analyzes voters' preferences for presidential candidates in real time based on voters' Weibo. Unstructured data has become a new engine for solving social and economic problems, which also adds endorsement to the prevalence and popularity of SNS.

LinkedIn lives under this rain and dew. It can be said in a clichéd way that it is a successful company created in the era of big data. But this is not enough to explain the value of LinkedIn. We know that the SNS websites Friendster and Myspace, which are equally popular, were once very popular, but the former was popular for only a year and finally turned into a social game company, living in a corner of the Philippines; the latter was acquired for 580 million and sold for 35 million. It has never recovered since it was surpassed by Facebook in 2009; Facebook has experienced a "roller coaster" development, and the trend of its stock price proves that the previous SNS star may have been just a false fire. Only LinkedIn has continued to grow steadily for 9 years, which is reflected in its market value, stock price, growth rate, and user feedback. (The growth of stock price, users, and profits is shown in the figure below)

LinkedIn's stock price chart (data from Yahoo)

Facebook stock price chart

For SNS websites that never lack attention, the logic behind LinkedIn's sustained growth is the biggest revelation. For any Internet company, monetization is the result, users are the bridge, and services are the cause. Only with cause and effect can there be a cycle. The unique value of LinkedIn lies in the fact that it has established an efficient, stable, and renewable ecological system based on a precise professional user data platform. To use an advertising slogan, it is a victory of the system. This system includes:

Bridge: Accurate information on nearly 200 million highly qualified professional users - so complete

Result: Using user information to solve the asymmetric problem of recruitment and advertising has led to successful monetization - so it is renewable

Reason: accurate positioning, always adhering to the product concept of "user scale and usage depth" as the goal - so stable

User: Establishment of professional user data platform

Big and complex are the characteristics of big data. Specifically for LinkedIn, it is the user scale and depth of usage, which is the "user base and engagement" that LinkedIn has repeatedly mentioned in its IPO and financial statements.

Scale: LinkedIn now has 175 million users, 108 million unique visitors, and 18.8 billion page views. Each user's data includes real background information, the user's network, the groups and discussions they participate in, the companies they follow, and the applications they use.

Quality: Unlike other SNS websites, LinkedIn has a clearer user orientation since its inception - high-end professional users. This is in LinkedIn's entrepreneurial genes. In the early days of "pulling customers", Hoffman targeted all the senior executives he knew in Silicon Valley. More than 59% of LinkedIn members are male. 59% of LinkedIn members are over 35 years old, 94% are over 25 years old, and 0 are under 18 years old. Facebook has 7.5 million users under 13 years old. This avoids an important risk in the development of SNS, the issue of children's privacy and protection. Data from Pew shows that 74% of LinkedIn registered members have a college degree or above, and 38% have a master's degree; data from online MBA shows that 69% of users have an annual income of more than $60,000. 39% have an annual income of more than $100,000. In LinkedIn's words, its users are all "decision makers."

Data from: pewinternet.org

LinkedIn, AndersonAnalytics and its software partner SPSS have conducted a study that found that personal income, professional success and the use of LinkedIn are highly correlated. The proportion of people with an annual income of $200,000 to $350,000 using LinkedIn is 7 times higher than that of people with an annual income of less than $150,000; 28% of LinkedIn users have an annual income of more than $104,000, and 30% of LinkedIn users are consultants. High-quality, high-income, and highly educated users are the most favored by advertisers. This solves another shortcoming of SNS, the problem of user value and profit conversion.

User usage habits: In terms of user penetration, LinkedIn's data has obvious shortcomings, with user usage time of only 18 minutes (Facebook is 400 minutes). However, LinkedIn's user usage habits are different from other SNSs that are positioned for entertainment. This type of user has a very clear page lock on the SNS website, and rarely "aimlessly" browses. My 30-year-old postgraduate and I became LinkedIn users a year ago. We log in about twice a week, each time for about half an hour. We read the news, jobs, friends, companies and groups recommended to us by LinkedIn, and of course, advertisements, which increases selectivity. We don't browse too many pages to explore information, because the push notifications to us basically cover what we are looking for, and practical value is the basis of our choice. As a user, I feel that our relationship with LINKEDIN is more like a marriage. The passion has passed, the curiosity has gradually disappeared, but the habit continues. But in love, habits are often the most terrible and will last longer. Because of this, even though Facebook users are more likely to indulge, its new user acquisition cost is higher. LinkedIn's user acquisition cost is $1.3/person, while Facebook's acquisition cost is $4.29/person.

It is this user scale, complete information, user quality and usage habits that drive LinkedIn's monetization.

Monetization: Accurate data solves asymmetry problems

To monetize, user data must be used to solve customers' most difficult problems so that they can pay. Currently, LinkedIn makes profits through recruitment, advertising, and subscriptions. With a huge database of accurate information, LinkedIn solves the biggest problem of "information asymmetry" for customers. According to the financial data in the second quarter of 2012, LinkedIn's revenue was 216 million yuan, and these three methods contributed 224 million, 111 million, and 81 million, accounting for 54%, 27%, and 19% respectively. At the same time, the overall proportion of revenue obtained from recruitment solutions has increased rapidly.

Accurate, efficient and reliable recruitment

LinkedIn's recruitment solution solves the information asymmetry between recruiters and job seekers, and collects money from recruiting companies. So far, there are as many as 12 million companies using LinkedIn's recruitment solution. Let's take a look at the contribution of this business to LinkedIn.

Monster, once the largest recruitment website in the United States, pioneered the current traditional recruitment plan. Users provide resumes for free, companies pay to post job information, obtain applicants' resumes and pay according to the number of resumes. Users can also pay to obtain more information such as company contact information. The one-way search process often brings about time delays and adverse selection problems. Most of the time, it is necessary to wait for "willing ones to take the bait", and usually only suitable candidates can be found among the applicants. The adverse selection problem in economics makes this process sometimes unable to find the right "good currency", and there is a lack of corresponding mechanisms to confirm the authenticity of the applicant's information.

LinkedIn has completely broken this constraint and formed an active, real and efficient recruitment mechanism. The big data platform formed by complete personal information has become the key to increasing revenue and reducing costs for recruiting companies.

In the talent acquisition process, LinkedIn conducts a filtered search among the entire 174 million users, breaking the previous limitation of only recruiting job applicants. The SNS platform has dramatically expanded the scope of recruitment. At the same time, recruiting companies can quickly and accurately anchor the most suitable talents by setting multiple keywords such as location, skills, previous companies, and educational background, and have changed from passively waiting for "willing ones to take the bait" to actively hunting. In particular, LinkedIn's data storage of high-end professional talents is probably something that many headhunters have been working hard for many years. At the same time, LinkedIn has a precise push system to recommend positions of interest to users. Even if users are not looking for jobs, this has greatly activated the job information released by companies. Forbes once quoted a talent search competition planned by Adobe's vice president of recruitment, Wei Jung (looking for 50 candidates for a technical position). The work was completed within a few hours using LinkedIn services, while the traditional method was still going on after several weeks.

In the communication process, especially for matching talents who are not job applicants, LinkedIn's user data platform is very useful. The interests, positions, groups, discussions and other information of the "prey" are clearly visible on their profile. After contacting the person through LinkedIn's network, communication based on his or her personal identity will naturally flow, thus avoiding abrupt contact. For high-end talents, this "natural" courtesy is particularly important. LinkedIn will also display the "relationship chain" between the target and the recruiting company. This relationship is usually linked through the employees of the recruiting company. The company can ask its own employees for recommendations. Such communication is often more recognized by potential recruits than a phone call without foreplay by a headhunter.

Of course, this relationship network has also become the best weapon to verify the information of recruitment targets because when LinkedIn invites friends, it usually requires the selection of the relevance of both parties, such as classmates, colleagues, alumni, etc. If there is no relevance, it will require the other party's email address, etc. If you frequently add irrelevant friends and get rejected, LinkedIn will restrict you from adding friends from the system, so most people will not take this risk to cheat personal information to create a false network. Through the user's relationship network, you can clearly see whether his previous work unit and work experience are true.

Considering ROI - the return on investment of recruitment, in addition to the above returns, another issue is cost. Most of LinkedIn's product "Recruitment Solutions" is aimed at large enterprises. The lowest order currently requires the purchase of three "position seats" per year, with a total price of 21,000 US dollars. In the US market, the cost of one position to the agency is about 20,000 US dollars at most. Another recruitment product "LinkedIn jobs" for small enterprises is a self-service system, which is cheaper. This is similar to Google's bidding ranking method. A position is posted for about 35 US dollars a month, and then bids are made for each click. The minimum CPC is 1 US dollar, and the monthly bid is at least 50 US dollars, that is, 50 clicks cost at least 85 US dollars a month, while a position posted on Monster costs at least 200-400 US dollars a month. Low price and good quality are the fundamental reasons why companies are willing to use LinkedIn's recruitment products. According to data from the US job search website Jobvite, 89% of US companies currently use LinkedIn recruitment; data from Bullhorn, a developer of recruitment software and candidate follow-up systems, shows that recruiters have more views on the LinkedIn network than on Twitter and Facebook combined. Recruiters post job ads on LinkedIn and receive nearly nine times more applications than on Facebook and three times more than on Twitter.

This may be a paradox: LinkedIn's success in recruitment is precisely because it is not a recruitment website, but an SNS platform built with users at the center. The authenticity of information, the huge amount of data, and the connection of relationship networks have solved the information asymmetry problem that has troubled recruiters in the traditional era. Recruitment has become a more transparent, accurate, multi-channel, and humane thing. The one-way history of text resumes may be a thing of the past.

From this perspective, it is not surprising that LinkedIn has rewritten the recruitment market in a short period of time. Let's look at the financial data to see how LinkedIn is gradually encroaching on traditional recruitment companies in the recruitment market. Headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles is still using old-fashioned methods to attract job seekers. The company's stock price has fallen sharply by 67% in the past five years, while the S&P 500 index has only fallen by 13% during the same period. Monster Worldwide, an online recruitment service provider, has performed even worse, with its stock price falling by 81% during the same period. Compared with the steady growth of LinkedIn's recruitment business, Monster's professional revenue in the first six months of 2012 was US$444 million, a 4% decrease from US$464 million in the same period last year.

Precisely targeted advertising

LinkedIn's advertising solution solves the information asymmetry between advertising companies and target audiences, and charges advertising companies money. Like the recruitment solution, LinkedIn has an "overall marketing solution" for large companies and a self-service advertising system for small and medium-sized enterprises and individuals. The former includes display ads and sponsored ads, while the latter is mainly in the form of self-service text ads. In 2010, 33,000 companies used LinkedIn's marketing solution.

The profit of Internet advertising is nothing more than the product of the number of advertisements and the real conversion rate (advertising click-through rate or purchase rate, etc.). Independent visitors, page views, browsing time, and visit frequency can all promote the realization of conversion rate. Facebook, the leader of SNS, is comparable to Yahoo and Google in these four data, while LinkedIn lags behind slightly in these data. However, as a new Internet model that is different from portals and search engines, the uniqueness of SNS websites in advertising display is the matching and accuracy of their delivery based on user information.

LinkedIn has the commonality of all SNS websites in terms of accuracy. Enterprises can determine the target users according to the nature of the advertisement, and then filter the people to whom the advertisement is delivered according to keywords, such as region, occupation, educational background, and company, and display them on the homepage of the selected users. This means that different users see completely different advertisements, forming a completely customized dynamic page. In July, I clicked on the advertisement for the Australian top-level domain .kiwi that was delivered to me. I had no choice but to work in the market at the domain name registry in China. In August, the advertisement for Adobe's marketing conference attracted me. I clicked on the advertisement and even applied to attend the conference. My friend who works in the financial industry has a page full of advertisements for financial exam training such as CFA and FRM. There is no doubt that matching enhances the click-through rate. Another reason why you are willing to click on LinkedIn's advertisements is that there are very few advertisements. On my homepage, there are usually 5-6 advertisements on the top, right and bottom, which are integrated with the information pushed to me such as "people you may know" and "jobs and companies you may be interested in". At the same time, because of the great professional matching with my work, my instinctive rejection of advertisements is reduced, and on the contrary, my recognition experience of advertisements is increased.

Compared with other SNS, LinkedIn's real advantage is that its 180 million users are real professionals. We have already said in the user analysis that nearly half of the users are professionals with an annual salary of more than 100,000 US dollars, who have higher purchasing power. At the same time, most users are attracted by LinkedIn's practical functions and log in to LinkedIn to find various solutions - professional, company promotion, product promotion. Therefore, we see more high-end training, international conferences, airlines, SEO solutions and other high-end advertisements on LinkedIn's page. Linkedin users are worth $1.3 per hour online, while Facebook users are only worth 0.6 cents per hour online.

The "three highs" of the target group and the professional nature of the advertising content make the price of LinkedIn's advertising not low. According to feedback from LinkedIn's sales staff, the starting price of the "LinkedIn Marketing Plan" for offline transactions is 2,500 yuan per month, and the minimum cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of display ads is 30 US dollars and the maximum is 76.50 US dollars; the price of another self-service text advertising system includes an account activation fee of 5 yuan, a cost per click (CPC) and a minimum CPM of 2.0 US dollars, a minimum of 10 US dollars per day, and a monthly range of 300-10,000 US dollars. Data from advertising tool developer TBG Digital shows that Facebook's average CPM in the world is only 22 cents; according to research by network data analysis company Webtrends, Facebook's average ad click-through rate last year was 0.05%, and the average CPC was 0.49 US dollars.

Of course, success or failure is due to Xiao He. The small number of ads that promote click-through rates and their specialization also create two constraints for LinkedIn advertising. One is the limitation of ad types. Consumer ads, which contribute half of the advertising fees, are difficult to find space on LinkedIn. This is due to the limitations of the user's usage context. No one wants to buy diapers when looking for a job. In addition, the practical value of LinkedIn and the number of advertising positions on its platform are also limited. In the multiplication equation of advertising revenue - number of ads × conversion rate, the number of ads and conversion rate form a tug-of-war situation. How to balance the relationship between the two has become the key to the growth of LinkedIn's advertising revenue.

Subscription Services: Free and Paid Valve

Value-added services are another difficult game to grasp. If free users enjoy too few services, the entire user base will decrease; if free users enjoy too many services, no one will be willing to pay for value-added services. Similar to the issue of universal love and exclusive love, ordinary users need to "share the benefits equally" so as not to defect and flee, but at the same time, more rewards must be offered to obtain more efforts from users. And users will only ask one question: Is the value-added service worth my money?

Take a look at this valve of LinkedIn. Creating a personal homepage, including a company homepage, and building your own network are universal rights for all users, and they must not be charged. This is the essence of SNS. The difference between free and paid lies in the accessibility of user information, and the resulting efficiency differences of various solutions. In other words, if you want to find more suitable people, you want to have a stable connection with them, and you want to improve the efficiency of finding jobs and talents, OK, pay some money. The idea of ​​making money in the "big data era" is particularly direct in this regard.

Similarly, LinkedIn has also differentiated its paid business based on advertising marketing and recruitment. Paid accounts are divided into accounts for workers, accounts for recruiters, and accounts for advertising marketers. Each type of account is divided into three different levels according to the amount of payment, but the overall logic is the same.

First, the number of information: When LinkedIn created its own relationship network, it set the principle of visibility to second-degree friends, that is, you can see the information of your friends (first-degree) friends (second-degree) for free and send them invitations (connect). If you want to develop third-degree friends to see their information, you need to upgrade to a premium account and purchase a subscription service. Faced with this limitation, LinkedIn users can turn to search options on the entire LinkedIn, so can't 180 million users still be obtained? The answer is no. Free users can only obtain 100 users through search, and can see 300, 500, and 700 users after paying according to different prices.

The second is the difficulty of obtaining information. Whether for job seekers, recruiters or marketers, the difficulty of activities on LinkedIn is not to search for matching objects, but how to obtain contact information and successfully contact the target users. All paid users of LinkedIn can get a new service "inMail". Through this internal email system, they can send messages to the target group. LinkedIn ensures that the other party will reply. This is obviously a good thing of "give and take", so the price of inmail is not cheap, with a unit price of up to US$10. For different groups of people, are the paid and charged "valves" easy to use?

For job seekers, another benefit is the optimization of search results, similar to Google's paid ranking. Paid users can be ranked higher in the search results for applicants for a certain job, which may be a "benefit" that job seekers value more.

For recruiters, an important benefit of paying users is that they can set the number of search keywords. In the three payment levels of recruiters, the keyword setting increases in tandem with the payment amount. The highest level recruiter paid account includes multiple keywords such as level, company, position, interests, years of work experience, whether or not they have worked for a Fortune 1000 company, team, years of work at the current company, years in this position, etc. Obviously, the more keywords, the more accurate the search, and there is no need to go through the trouble of secondary screening in a large number of search results.

From the perspective of improving efficiency, LinkedIn's paid services are worth the money, improving the work efficiency and target audience reach of recruiters, job seekers and marketers. The revenue from subscription services continues to grow, but the proportion of this part of the profit in LinkedIn's three major profit methods is gradually decreasing.

Back to the game of paying, no matter how valuable the paid service is, it cannot "treat" free users unfairly and cause them to leave. LinkedIn should have taken this factor into consideration. The restrictions on individual job seekers are not as many as those on recruiters and advertisers. For example, you can see all jobs that match your keywords, with no limit on the number. Even if you don't pay to get inmail, LinkedIn users can find company human resources by applying directly or visiting the company's homepage, and improve employment efficiency through indirect contact. Job seekers and high-end professionals constitute the value of LinkedIn. Regardless of advertising revenue, recruitment income, or even the subscription service itself, all profits are rooted in these 180 million high-end professional users, and free services have become the starting point for expanding new users and retaining old users. In this way, LinkedIn's valve for paying is still appropriately loose and tight.

Services and M&A: Four things LinkedIn did right

180 million users, 520 million annual revenue, steadily growing stock price and revenue, this is the result of LinkedIn's user energy and monetary benefits. You should know that Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook, which have far more users and attention than LinkedIn, have not achieved such a stable growth. To achieve this result, LinkedIn has done at least four things right in its operations:

LinkedIn Facebook
Closing price (2012.8.3) 108.51 21.09
Issue price 45 38
Share price increased by 141.10% – 44.5%
Number of users 174 million 995 million Annual user growth 50% 29.20%

1. Dedicated high-end positioning. LinkedIn targets high-end users and focuses on professional functions. It has never deviated from this track. Its product and service design meets the psychological needs of professionals and goes straight to the point without too much entertainment. Both the appearance page and the product texture reflect this goal. LinkedIn is simple enough in page design. It is mainly based on text and simple pictures. It is divided into three major sections: personal profile, network, and various personal applications. For the fully customized dynamic page centered on the personal homepage, simplicity, clarity and ease of operation are the key to attracting users. In terms of personal applicable services, that is, various APP software, LinkedIn prefers to have fewer than fewer. Currently, there are only 15, and they are all mainly for professional appeals, such as slideshare for sharing PPT, Amazon's bookshelf, investment portfolio, survey, etc., all of which are to show more of the user's career depth and breadth and make good use of the huge professional network.

2. Accurate information push. The push includes people you know, jobs, companies, and groups. For me, this feature is the most attractive part of LinkedIn, because the accuracy of its push reduces the time users waste on filtering massive data after logging in to LinkedIn. Behind the push is the effective movement of data. Jay Kreps from LinkedIn once introduced in detail how LinkedIn handles data. Many important data of LinkedIn are offline and move very slowly. Therefore, they regard daily batch processing of Hadoop as an important part of computing. For example, they use this method to pre-calculate the data of their "People You May Know" product, which will generate 120 billion relationships in the mapreduce pipeline (with 82 Hadoop jobs) every day, requiring 16TB of temporary data. This job uses a statistical model to predict the probability of two people knowing each other. Interestingly, they use bloom filters to speed up huge connection relationships, which improves performance by 10 times. Data mining technology has become the hottest technology in the "big data era".

3. Effective corporate mergers and acquisitions. LinkedIn's acquisitions are still a clear-minded process. All mergers and acquisitions are carried out around the "user base and engagement" that LinkedIn repeatedly emphasizes. I translate it into the number of users and the depth of use, as well as the monetization process based on users. The acquired CardMunch is a mobile business card transcription and import service. It can save manual labor and organize contact information in a digital way. It can automatically organize, capture and enter paper business card information into contacts in the mobile phone address book, which expands the user base. The acquired Connected is a personal relationship management tool. It puts all your contacts and all social behaviors in one place, which is also conducive to expanding the user base. The acquired SlideShare is an online document sharing service provider and a tool for professionals to display their professional talents, which improves user engagement. The acquired IndexTank is a real-time host search engine service. Importantly, it is not just a simple literature retrieval system. It can also do some real-time analysis of user data (for example, you can judge where the user is from based on some special sentences in the user), which has a key breakthrough for LinkedIn's precise advertising or job push, and strengthens monetization capabilities.

4. Mobile client with user-friendly interface. The trend of mobileization is no longer worth repeating. In the financial statements just released by LinkedIn, we can see that 22% of users visit LinkedIn through mobile devices. The value of LinkedIn's mobile users is far greater than that of Facebook. For Facebook, which is mainly based on advertising, the objective limitations of mobile device screens are not conducive to the display of advertisements. Facebook's financial statements have shown that the investment in mobile devices has led to a decrease in profits. This is why mobile users cannot be effectively converted into ad clicks. LinkedIn's profit-making method, which is mainly based on recruitment and advertising, is not subject to this objective limitation. Mobile users, effective visits, advertising and profit conversion rate form a proportional cycle. Recently, LinkedIn has updated the latest client based on the characteristics of sliding left and right on handheld devices. The interface is very friendly and simple. It can be expected that mobile users will continue to grow in the future.

Conclusion: Those "lessons from the past"

Finally, let's look at the early SNS predecessors Friendster and Myspace. These once popular SNS websites have long since become "beauties of old age". It can be said that their lives are a true portrayal of "water can carry a boat, but it can also overturn it". They both welcomed a huge number of users in a very short period of time and became the most watched Internet companies at the time. However, the influx of users collided with the shortcomings of the websites themselves, and they were on the verge of collapse and could not be reversed.

Friendster was popular for only one year, from 2003 to 2004. In order to meet the entertainment needs of users, personal homepages were allowed to be fully personalized. Videos, large pictures, and files flooded into the Friendster platform, and the website was weak and slow to access. Because the website could not afford large-scale user visits, it took the solution of deleting fake accounts. In the end, deleting the account of a certain American pop band became the last straw. Users began to enthusiastically rush to Myspace, which opened its arms to musicians, and MYSPACE began its five-year boom.

Myspace was once a star enterprise in the SNS industry, with 200 million registered users at its peak, 900 million advertising fees from Google in three years, and the acquisition price from News Corporation as high as 580 million. Myspace was crushed by problems with its website architecture. Like Friendster, the expansion of user visits led to slow website access speeds; there were also system problems after being acquired by News Corporation, which once became the main theme in comments after the decline of MYSPACE; and the last straw that crushed Myspace was privacy and social issues. As the main users of Myspace, teenagers used Myspace to hold illegal gatherings, and some teenagers were harmed in the process, which then triggered a large-scale joint boycott by the law, scholars, journalists, and police. After 2006, Myspace became obsessed with handling various legal complaints, and its development slowed down. By the time it recovered, Facebook had already replaced it.

American scholars say: The essential characteristic of SNS is the viral growth and death. Therefore, SNS is an industry that is updated too quickly. The replacement process can be described as "pear blossoms blooming overnight." Many people say that this is the era of Facebook, but Facebook has also fallen into the vicious circle of the rapid expansion and rapid death of SNS. Whether we can escape this vicious circle, we still need time.

The one that really escaped this vicious circle was LinkedIn, which was born at the same time as them and had the last laugh. Compared with Friendster, LinkedIn is clean and simple, and the load brought by personal homepages is not large. Even if the number of users increases sharply, it will not cause a collapse. At the same time, LinkedIn is completely real-name and has many restrictions on adding friends, so there are not too many false accounts. Compared with Myspace, LinkedIn is positioned for adults and high-end professional users, and has achieved basic guarantees in terms of privacy protection and personal safety. In addition, its practical positioning and functions make it difficult for various gatherings and groups with bad tendencies to survive.

Dialectics is a universal philosophy, and the conservation of energy is a common principle, which is also the difference between long-distance running and short-distance running. After several Internet bubbles, short-distance runners have gradually run out of tricks in the market. LinkedIn is undoubtedly a long-distance runner. After its IPO, it experienced employee cashing out and account theft, but its stock price still returned to stable growth. LinkedIn may be able to run into the next decade without falling or retiring.