It is an unwritten law of the social web:
He who gives traffic shall see his share buttons multiply across the Internet
One detail that caught my eye in LinkedIn’s earnings announcement today is that those LinkedIn share buttons are now on 100,000 sites. The proliferation of those buttons (we use them here on TechCrunch) helps populate people’s feeds in LinkedIn and creates another reason to visit the site. I wonder how much the buttons, along with the launch of LinkedIn Today (LinkedIn’s social news product) last March contributed to the 83 percent jump in unique visitors. All of the publicity around its IPO must have helped also.
The more that people go to LinkedIn to check out the latest news, the more they stick around and the more likely they are to do other revenue-generating things like look for a job or sign up for a premium subscription. And the company is turning on a lot of revenue dials. LinkedIn reported a 121 percent growth in revenue to $121 million in the quarter, and a net profit of $4.5 million.
We’ve certainly seen the effects of LinkedIn sharing here on TechCrunch to the point where it is now a bigger source of traffic than Twitter.com. Their sharing buttons also seem to register shares much faster than Twitter’s (although I suspect they are counting a lot of retweets since members can populate their LinkedIn accounts with their Twitter feeds, but they seem to be registering those retweets faster than Twitter itself and calling it a LinkedIn share). All I know is that LinkedIn drives lots of traffic.
With over 225 million users representing over 200 countries around the world, LinkedIn is a fast-growing professional networking site that allows members to create business contacts, search for jobs, and find potential clients. Individuals have the ability to create their own professional profile that can be viewed by others in their network, and also view the profiles of their own contacts. Competitors to LinkedIn include sites such as XING, Doostang and Ecademy. Of note, LinkedIn won...
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