Facebook vs. LinkedIn or “This town’s not big enough for the both of us.”
What with LinkedIn’s more than stellar IPO this past week, I’m forced to ask myself the big question: Is there room enough for both Facebook and LinkedIn to co-exist without stepping on each others toes? Can they both continue to be profitable and innovative without ultimately running headlong into each other? Let’s take a look at both networks, their missions and histories, and see what we find.
Since it’s beginning, LinkedIn was very clear in it’s purpose, which was to be a career-based network for professionals. They are something like your online desk rolodex, allowing you to remain in touch with associates, co-workers, and other professional contacts. LinkedIn wasn’t the only one in this space, but they became the industry leaders, by building into it’s application many features of interest to networking professionals, such as resources for the job seeker, the recruiter, industry and professional organizations and groups, user groups and the like. LinkedIn has never lost sight of its core audience and user base and continues to develop solutions with them in mind.
Everyone already knows the story of Facebook and it’s meteoric rise to become the worlds largest social network. What continues to drive and keep Facebook on the forefront is their ability to continually innovate and improve their tools as well as introduce new tools and features as well. Facebook has pretty much eliminated almost all other social networks that are not catering to a specific demographic, like LinkedIn is. I can almost guarantee you that everyone who has a LinkedIn page, has a Facebook page, but not the reverse. Now the question that begs asking is, how long will it be until Facebook sets it’s sights on Professional Networking?
I can imagine this discussion is going on at Facebook headquarters right now. It only seems natural that their next logical step would be to try and jump into professional networking. They have the money, developer base, and the user base so that any foray into professional networking, even if it was sub par to what LinkedIn offers, would be jumped on by millions of users. That would be a shot across the bow for LinkedIn and a challenge to their very survival. Could they survive? Ask yourself, if LinkedIn added non-professional oriented social networking features to their offerings, would you use them? Probably not, that’s what Facebook is for, right? But if Facebook suddenly offered professional networking features like LinkedIn would you use them? Probably. Because we are already using Facebook for almost everything else in our online social experiences. Everyone is already comfortable with the Facebook experience. It’s a no brainer.
My gut tells me there are some people at LinkedIn that know this and are probably a little worried by it. I know I would be. But they still have time. Let them bask in the glow of their incredibly successful IPO, and hopefully use those resources to continue to make a standout product. But they should never take their eyes off of the sleeping giant, who may awaken at any time and come after what they have worked so hard for. As for me, I’m a big fan of what LinkedIn has provided these past 7 or so years. But I wouldn’t mind a single source to be able to manage both sides of my life.
