Growth Hacking on LinkedIn: audience growth from 13 users to 400 million
How did the Silicon Valley IT community site become the world's largest professional network? Let us analyze the history of LinkedIn and understand what kind of hacks they used to achieve such success.
Article author: Nelli Orlova . Entrepreneur, mentor, technology broker. The first startup launched in 2006, has since successfully commercialized a number of innovative startups. Co-founder of the Swiss-Eurasian platform INNOVARE and InnMind
LinkedIn is the world's largest business social network, with the help of which more than 400 million professionals from 200 countries make business contacts, build careers, search for employees, create and develop their own image in the business environment.
')
For 12 years since its launch, thousands of such projects have been loudly declared and blown away. And LinkedIn consistently and stubbornly continued to demonstrate a multiple audience growth, business scaling, the development of new revenue streams, which, of course, capitalized into share growth and billions in revenue.
At the same time, for all 12 years of its existence, LinkedIn has not had a single serious competitor ( who is ready to argue with that - we are waiting for your comments below ).
How did Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn) and his partners succeed? What is LinkedIn's secret to success? I have long been asking myself this question, considering the history of LinkedIn as the clearest example of the development and take-off of a real startup, and its creator, Reid Hoffman, as an example for imitation for every modern innovative entrepreneur.
In the history of LinkedIn, there are no lucky coincidences, such as unexpectedly forking out under the idea of ​​an investor or an unexpected turn of the market in the right direction. But it has a well-thought-out strategy, a huge and hard work of a well-coordinated team of professionals, a flexible business model and a deep understanding of the needs of the market and users.
In general, everything that a startup needs in order to achieve a planned, not accidental, success.
Unfortunately, in the Russian-language Internet there is not so much information about the history of the creation and development of the LinkedIn network, so this post was created on the basis of information from Western publications.
In it, we will try to trace the development history of LinkedIn and analyze the key success factors. How did the creators manage to turn the first 13 users, registered at the request of Hoffman and his partners, into 400 million active participants worldwide?
This will be useful not only to the owners of IT start-ups, but also to all those involved in the development and scaling of their own business. You need to learn from the best, right? So let's learn from the founders of LinkedIn.
I advise you to read - Do you know what Growth Hacking is? [11 cases inside]
Interestingly, the very moment of creating and launching LinkedIn came at the time of the collapse of the dot-coms in the early 2000s, when the Internet business experienced difficult times, the American economy was in crisis, and the atmosphere in Silicon Valley was, to put it mildly, decadent and depressive.
It was at this time in 2002 that Reid Hoffman decided to involve his former colleagues on SocialNet and PayPal in order to start working together on a new idea of ​​a social network that allows professionals to find each other and establish business contacts.
Inspired by the idea of ​​the business network SixDegrees.com, which took off in the nineties and ceased to exist just in the crisis of the 2000s, Reid Hoffman and the team decided to create their own business social network.
According to Hoffman , he took all the risks on LinkedIn's primary financing, investing money in it that he had already earned in PayPal. This allowed the team to calmly and without undue stress (as compared to attracting a bank loan or venture capital investment) to begin work on creating a future global network of professional contacts.
But such LinkedIn was only a few years later. It is difficult to imagine, but then, in early 2003, LinkedIn social network began with a few dozen users.
The first step of the founders of LinkedIn immediately after launch (the official launch took place in May 2003, 6 months after the start of work on the creation) was the invitation to the social network of their close circle of professional contacts accumulated during previous work in Silicon Valley.
According to Hoffman, in the early days they started very slowly, inviting only a close circle of contacts, because they wanted to make sure that all the site systems were working properly.
Thus, the first users of LinkedIn were 13 people directly connected with the company, who in turn invited 112 more people from their circle of contacts.
A key factor in LinkedIn’s very first success was that Hoffman among his first users invited his successful friends from Silicon Valley, those who in turn already had reputation, fame and a wide circle of contacts.
This allowed LinkedIn to quickly attract the majority of the active inhabitants of the Valley, who registered on the network to gain access to potential investors, partners and consultants.
LinkedIn has become a must have for the local professional community. And with each newly registered user, the network effect gained momentum: LinkedIn soon became a place to search for resources, contacts and work for all IT specialists in the Valley.
In fact, the beginning of LinkedIn success was the achievement of a critical mass of users in a narrow localized area - in Silicon Valley. Almost the same as the Facebook network 5 years later developed from the audience of a single school to the global scale, and 10 years later Uber began its international promotion from one city.
Achieving a critical mass in a narrow area (or a narrow audience of users) allowed all of them to gain invaluable experience in creating and expanding a loyal audience, reputation and popularity, which subsequently allowed them to go beyond the primary market and begin scaling the business model.
By the summer of 2003, several thousand users had registered with LinkedIn. However, at first, according to the company's estimates, the growth in the number of users went slowly; within a few weeks after opening, LinkedIn registered 10-20 people per day.
However, after 4 months, LinkedIn crossed the mark of 50 thousand users. At the same time, the company raised $ 4.7 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, and within a year after the launch of LinkedIn, the number reached half a million registered users.
Only 3 years after launch, in 2006 the company showed the first profit, and 8 years after launch in 2011 it entered an IPO.
I advise you to read - Growth Hacking: How to choose the right approach for your company
Have you heard of the theory of six handshakes ? According to her, any two people on Earth are separated on average by only five levels of common friends (or six levels of connections).
This theory was advanced in the 1960s by American psychologists Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers. Their hypothesis was that each person was indirectly familiar with any other inhabitant of the planet through a chain of mutual friends, on average consisting of five people.
And now attention: it was the theory of six handshakes that became the basis of the LinkedIn business concept, which implies that only six levels of links will lead you to any person you would like to establish contact with. In the post-Soviet space, this is reflected in the proverb “through five handshakes I know the English queen.”
The practical implementation of this concept in LinkedIn is that participants can take advantage of this chain of business connections by creating and developing a transparent network of their own professional contacts online. In the picture - a visual image of the branching network of contacts of a single user.
The main premise is that an important condition for establishing a business contact, job search or employee is a recommendation from a reliable and trusted person who is familiar with you and is ready with his reputation to help move your name forward along the chain to the cherished goal.
Interestingly, the authors of the basic concept of LinkedIn were not at all Hoffman and his team. In fact, the first to apply this concept in practice for a social network was the lawyer and founder of sixdegrees.com ( the same business network that closed in 2001 and inspired Hoffman with the team to create LinkedIn ) Andrew Weinreich.
By the time his project was closed, Weinreich and his partners registered a patent with a wide range of claims describing the Sixdegrees site innovations on the practical application of the theory of six levels of links. In 2003, the company LinkedIn bought a patent for $ 700 thousand.
Despite the fact that the main concept of the social network was borrowed from Sixdegrees, LinkedIn was able to find its own niche and unique positioning. Unlike all other social networks, which at that time allowed users to establish contacts with anyone and everyone, LinkedIn users could establish contacts only with really familiar people, as well as establish new connections, but only on the recommendation of one of their professional contacts.
It would seem that they significantly limited users in their freedom of action and the development of a network of contacts, so why didn't they lose their audience?
This is where the genius of Hoffman and other creators of LinkedIn lies: with the help of such restrictions, they managed to save users from spam, annoying mailings and unwanted contacts that invariably annoy users in all social networks. And thus create a private, secure, status business network consisting of loyal and active users.
I advise you to read - Growth Hacking: 36 real-life cases - Part 1
According to some data, LinkedIn began its monetization with Adbrite advertisements in mid-2004. The result was insignificant, and nevertheless, it continued like this until 2005, when LinkedIn launched new monetization mechanisms: publication of vacancies, paid subscriptions and advertising. The consequence of this was that by 2006, LinkedIn had reached self-sufficiency and began to make a profit.
According to Hoffman, initially LinkedIn did not plan to introduce advertising, but two factors convinced him of the need for this: excellent demographic indicators and the ability to offer users a unique product.
Instead of just focusing on extracting income from one source, as many before them did, LinkedIn founders did not put all their eggs in one basket and created an extensive income stream, quite successfully combining the sale of advertising with the Freemium model.
Thus, LinkedIn monetized its key asset by offering a paid subscription in order to simplify the establishment of new contacts. Registration on the site and most of the basic functions, including the creation and development of its own network of professional contacts, are still available for a free subscription.
And at the same time, paid premium subscriptions are offered for different groups of users (enterprises, recruiters, job seekers and salespeople), which provide users with additional opportunities to solve their business problems.
I advise you to read - Growth Hacking: 36 real-life cases - Part 2
At 2012 Growth Hacker's conference in LinkedIn, Elliot Shmukler (Elliot Shmukler) made a presentation on the theme “Lessons learned from LinkedIn growth from 13 to 175 million users”. According to him, the main lesson of LinkedIn was that "it is easier to focus on strengths than to try to improve the weak."
Shmukler cited the following indicators showing LinkedIn growth points in 2008: email invitations and registration on the main page.
Conversion in registration via email invitations:
Up to optimization - 4%. After optimization - 7% (+19,000 users). The process took 2 years
Conversion in registration from the main page:
Up to optimization - 40%. After optimization - 50% (+13,000 users). The process took 4 months
The 40% registration rate from the main page was an obvious strong point at the time.
According to LinkedIn, people who came and registered on the site from the main page, visited an average of thirty pages in one session, while people who came through email invitations attended an average of ten pages.
The conclusion suggested itself that invitations by email attracted mostly inactive visitors, and therefore this is not the channel that can be considered effective for multiple growth, despite the fact that it was effective in the early stages of LinkedIn development.
Therefore, it was decided to focus on the channel that has already generated the largest number of active users - on the main page. And it certainly was a wise decision on LinkedIn.
By optimizing the main page, they managed in just four months to generate the same influx of registered users as in two years of optimizing email dispatches.
These figures prove that from the point of view of growth hacking, with the task of multiple growth in the shortest possible time, an emphasis on strengths seems to be much more effective than an attempt to improve "weak spots."
I advise you to read - They will help you find all the "killers" of conversion - 10 reports in Google Analytics
The value of active users is not so much in their involvement in internal correspondence and communication, but in the fact that they play a critical role in spurring existing inactive users, as well as in attracting new ones.
This effect of viral spread is a major factor in the multiplication of LinkedIn. It is easy to guess why: the x-factor of any network of professional contacts lies in the achievement of the level at which the user can satisfy their needs by finding the contact of the person he needs.
And Hoffman understood that in order to do this he needed to attract as many users as possible to LinkedIn.
According to him, the whole of 2003 was devoted to creating a viral effect of development.
Former employees of LinkedIn, who worked for the company at the time, unanimously claim that the viral effect was not an accident or a lucky coincidence.
It was persistent, consistent analysis, optimization, engagement and improvement. LinkedIn even postponed the launch of all paid services until such time as the multiple growth starts due to the viral effect.
In the end, it took 1.5 years.
So what did they do to achieve the necessary viral effect? Easier to list what they did not!
For starters, they literally tested everything. New users were sent welcome letters asking them to invite friends - and at the same time the company tried to find a winning combination to convert the largest number of invitations into new users.
So they discovered that 4 is the ideal number of fields for entering new email addresses for invitations. If there were fewer fields, users simply did not pay attention to them, and if there were more, it bothered them and made them refuse to send invitations.
These and other complex efforts have led to significant, but still slow in terms of "viral" growth. The vast majority of users still had contact with only one LinkedIn user, which meant that they accepted someone's invitation, registered, but were not involved further in the process of forming their own network of contacts, sending invitations, etc.
In fact, only less than a quarter of new users entered their email addresses into forms for sending invitations.
It was at this stage, after analyzing the data, in LinkedIn began work on the concept of importing contacts from email clients. Now this is a common phenomenon, almost must have for any social network, but then in 2004, the function of entering an email address and password in the form on the site with the permission of the network to access all contacts was a fresh, innovative solution.
LinkedIn employees wrote a special plugin for Outlook, which could be installed on a computer and “upload” your contacts to a social network through it.
Yes, today it sounds an anachronism, but imagine what an improvement it was at that time compared to manually entering email addresses!
Only 7% of users who used this feature increased the number of invitations on LinkedIn by more than 30%.
Despite the significant growth of users, caused by all these efforts, the numbers showed that the network of contacts of the majority of users still consisted of only one person.
Other studies have shown that until the decision to register on LinkedIn, the user needed to receive an average of 3.2 letters of invitation.
It was necessary to find an opportunity to reverse this trend, and for this the LinkedIn team decided to use the information that they accumulated in abundance.
When people registered with LinkedIn, one of the first questions they asked was a question about their current position and the company in which they worked. And more than 90% of users answered this question.
LinkedIn used this information to create an additional stream of new contacts and links within the network. As soon as the user registered, he was offered a list of other employees of his company already registered with LinkedIn with the question: “Which of them do you know?”. In order to establish contact, it was only necessary to click the mouse opposite the corresponding surnames.
The introduction of this option has increased the number of contacts being installed. Not stopping there, LinkedIn added questions about the companies in which users worked before. And, again, after entering the company, the user was offered a list of potential contacts of employees from their previous jobs.
The genius of these seemingly uncomplicated innovations was that, in addition to the additional possibilities for establishing contacts between users, this made it possible to create a fundamentally new user profile structure: each module of the information entered was presented as part of the user's professional experience.
And the more people joined the social network, sending requests to contact their current or former colleagues, the more it contributed to the involvement of previously registered but inactive users who received invitations and returned to the site to accept and establish new contacts. .
These efforts have greatly helped launch a viral spread response: the number of page views increased by 41%, the search for new contacts by 33%, and the filling of previous work experience by 38%.
And, despite the fact that the new logic of actions for registering and completing profiles has significantly shifted the process of sending invitations, the number of sent invitations also increased by 16%.
According to a former employee of the company and growth hacking specialist Josh Elman, all these actions led to the effect of the Double Viral Loop.
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!
, LinkedIn, , , , , .
, ( ), .
, 2012, , «» .
, , LinkedIn. , email , .
— 10 A/B
growth hack LinkedIn – google. , 2006 !
LinkedIn.
LinkedIn .
– , . !
LinkedIn , .
google LinkedIn . LinkedIn .
, , . LinkedIn , 2 .
, , LinkedIn , google, , .
, LinkedIn , , , , , , -. , LinkedIn , .
– , LinkedIn.
– , , 12 , , LinkedIn , , , .
, ! , .
, Growth Hacking Linkedin, . They will be grateful for that. And I even more so!
Article author: Nelli Orlova . Entrepreneur, mentor, technology broker. The first startup launched in 2006, has since successfully commercialized a number of innovative startups. Co-founder of the Swiss-Eurasian platform INNOVARE and InnMind
LinkedIn is the world's largest business social network, with the help of which more than 400 million professionals from 200 countries make business contacts, build careers, search for employees, create and develop their own image in the business environment.
')
For 12 years since its launch, thousands of such projects have been loudly declared and blown away. And LinkedIn consistently and stubbornly continued to demonstrate a multiple audience growth, business scaling, the development of new revenue streams, which, of course, capitalized into share growth and billions in revenue.
At the same time, for all 12 years of its existence, LinkedIn has not had a single serious competitor ( who is ready to argue with that - we are waiting for your comments below ).
How did Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn) and his partners succeed? What is LinkedIn's secret to success? I have long been asking myself this question, considering the history of LinkedIn as the clearest example of the development and take-off of a real startup, and its creator, Reid Hoffman, as an example for imitation for every modern innovative entrepreneur.
In the history of LinkedIn, there are no lucky coincidences, such as unexpectedly forking out under the idea of ​​an investor or an unexpected turn of the market in the right direction. But it has a well-thought-out strategy, a huge and hard work of a well-coordinated team of professionals, a flexible business model and a deep understanding of the needs of the market and users.
In general, everything that a startup needs in order to achieve a planned, not accidental, success.
Unfortunately, in the Russian-language Internet there is not so much information about the history of the creation and development of the LinkedIn network, so this post was created on the basis of information from Western publications.
In it, we will try to trace the development history of LinkedIn and analyze the key success factors. How did the creators manage to turn the first 13 users, registered at the request of Hoffman and his partners, into 400 million active participants worldwide?
This will be useful not only to the owners of IT start-ups, but also to all those involved in the development and scaling of their own business. You need to learn from the best, right? So let's learn from the founders of LinkedIn.
I advise you to read - Do you know what Growth Hacking is? [11 cases inside]
History of creation
Interestingly, the very moment of creating and launching LinkedIn came at the time of the collapse of the dot-coms in the early 2000s, when the Internet business experienced difficult times, the American economy was in crisis, and the atmosphere in Silicon Valley was, to put it mildly, decadent and depressive.
It was at this time in 2002 that Reid Hoffman decided to involve his former colleagues on SocialNet and PayPal in order to start working together on a new idea of ​​a social network that allows professionals to find each other and establish business contacts.
Inspired by the idea of ​​the business network SixDegrees.com, which took off in the nineties and ceased to exist just in the crisis of the 2000s, Reid Hoffman and the team decided to create their own business social network.
According to Hoffman , he took all the risks on LinkedIn's primary financing, investing money in it that he had already earned in PayPal. This allowed the team to calmly and without undue stress (as compared to attracting a bank loan or venture capital investment) to begin work on creating a future global network of professional contacts.
But such LinkedIn was only a few years later. It is difficult to imagine, but then, in early 2003, LinkedIn social network began with a few dozen users.
The first step of the founders of LinkedIn immediately after launch (the official launch took place in May 2003, 6 months after the start of work on the creation) was the invitation to the social network of their close circle of professional contacts accumulated during previous work in Silicon Valley.
According to Hoffman, in the early days they started very slowly, inviting only a close circle of contacts, because they wanted to make sure that all the site systems were working properly.
Thus, the first users of LinkedIn were 13 people directly connected with the company, who in turn invited 112 more people from their circle of contacts.
A key factor in LinkedIn’s very first success was that Hoffman among his first users invited his successful friends from Silicon Valley, those who in turn already had reputation, fame and a wide circle of contacts.
This allowed LinkedIn to quickly attract the majority of the active inhabitants of the Valley, who registered on the network to gain access to potential investors, partners and consultants.
LinkedIn has become a must have for the local professional community. And with each newly registered user, the network effect gained momentum: LinkedIn soon became a place to search for resources, contacts and work for all IT specialists in the Valley.
In fact, the beginning of LinkedIn success was the achievement of a critical mass of users in a narrow localized area - in Silicon Valley. Almost the same as the Facebook network 5 years later developed from the audience of a single school to the global scale, and 10 years later Uber began its international promotion from one city.
Achieving a critical mass in a narrow area (or a narrow audience of users) allowed all of them to gain invaluable experience in creating and expanding a loyal audience, reputation and popularity, which subsequently allowed them to go beyond the primary market and begin scaling the business model.
By the summer of 2003, several thousand users had registered with LinkedIn. However, at first, according to the company's estimates, the growth in the number of users went slowly; within a few weeks after opening, LinkedIn registered 10-20 people per day.
However, after 4 months, LinkedIn crossed the mark of 50 thousand users. At the same time, the company raised $ 4.7 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, and within a year after the launch of LinkedIn, the number reached half a million registered users.
Only 3 years after launch, in 2006 the company showed the first profit, and 8 years after launch in 2011 it entered an IPO.
I advise you to read - Growth Hacking: How to choose the right approach for your company
The secret to success is the theory of six handshakes.
Have you heard of the theory of six handshakes ? According to her, any two people on Earth are separated on average by only five levels of common friends (or six levels of connections).
This theory was advanced in the 1960s by American psychologists Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers. Their hypothesis was that each person was indirectly familiar with any other inhabitant of the planet through a chain of mutual friends, on average consisting of five people.
And now attention: it was the theory of six handshakes that became the basis of the LinkedIn business concept, which implies that only six levels of links will lead you to any person you would like to establish contact with. In the post-Soviet space, this is reflected in the proverb “through five handshakes I know the English queen.”
The practical implementation of this concept in LinkedIn is that participants can take advantage of this chain of business connections by creating and developing a transparent network of their own professional contacts online. In the picture - a visual image of the branching network of contacts of a single user.
The main premise is that an important condition for establishing a business contact, job search or employee is a recommendation from a reliable and trusted person who is familiar with you and is ready with his reputation to help move your name forward along the chain to the cherished goal.
Interestingly, the authors of the basic concept of LinkedIn were not at all Hoffman and his team. In fact, the first to apply this concept in practice for a social network was the lawyer and founder of sixdegrees.com ( the same business network that closed in 2001 and inspired Hoffman with the team to create LinkedIn ) Andrew Weinreich.
By the time his project was closed, Weinreich and his partners registered a patent with a wide range of claims describing the Sixdegrees site innovations on the practical application of the theory of six levels of links. In 2003, the company LinkedIn bought a patent for $ 700 thousand.
Despite the fact that the main concept of the social network was borrowed from Sixdegrees, LinkedIn was able to find its own niche and unique positioning. Unlike all other social networks, which at that time allowed users to establish contacts with anyone and everyone, LinkedIn users could establish contacts only with really familiar people, as well as establish new connections, but only on the recommendation of one of their professional contacts.
It would seem that they significantly limited users in their freedom of action and the development of a network of contacts, so why didn't they lose their audience?
This is where the genius of Hoffman and other creators of LinkedIn lies: with the help of such restrictions, they managed to save users from spam, annoying mailings and unwanted contacts that invariably annoy users in all social networks. And thus create a private, secure, status business network consisting of loyal and active users.
I advise you to read - Growth Hacking: 36 real-life cases - Part 1
Flexible business model and freemium
According to some data, LinkedIn began its monetization with Adbrite advertisements in mid-2004. The result was insignificant, and nevertheless, it continued like this until 2005, when LinkedIn launched new monetization mechanisms: publication of vacancies, paid subscriptions and advertising. The consequence of this was that by 2006, LinkedIn had reached self-sufficiency and began to make a profit.
According to Hoffman, initially LinkedIn did not plan to introduce advertising, but two factors convinced him of the need for this: excellent demographic indicators and the ability to offer users a unique product.
Instead of just focusing on extracting income from one source, as many before them did, LinkedIn founders did not put all their eggs in one basket and created an extensive income stream, quite successfully combining the sale of advertising with the Freemium model.
“ We decided that this would help us quickly achieve profitability. We have launched paid subscriptions that allow us to expand our search and establish new connections. Users need to establish contact with new people outside their own network of contacts in order to, for example, get a job. And this is the main source of our business today, ”says Reid Hoffman.
Thus, LinkedIn monetized its key asset by offering a paid subscription in order to simplify the establishment of new contacts. Registration on the site and most of the basic functions, including the creation and development of its own network of professional contacts, are still available for a free subscription.
And at the same time, paid premium subscriptions are offered for different groups of users (enterprises, recruiters, job seekers and salespeople), which provide users with additional opportunities to solve their business problems.
I advise you to read - Growth Hacking: 36 real-life cases - Part 2
Growth hack first: analysis and focus on active users.
At 2012 Growth Hacker's conference in LinkedIn, Elliot Shmukler (Elliot Shmukler) made a presentation on the theme “Lessons learned from LinkedIn growth from 13 to 175 million users”. According to him, the main lesson of LinkedIn was that "it is easier to focus on strengths than to try to improve the weak."
Shmukler cited the following indicators showing LinkedIn growth points in 2008: email invitations and registration on the main page.
Conversion in registration via email invitations:
Up to optimization - 4%. After optimization - 7% (+19,000 users). The process took 2 years
Conversion in registration from the main page:
Up to optimization - 40%. After optimization - 50% (+13,000 users). The process took 4 months
The 40% registration rate from the main page was an obvious strong point at the time.
According to LinkedIn, people who came and registered on the site from the main page, visited an average of thirty pages in one session, while people who came through email invitations attended an average of ten pages.
The conclusion suggested itself that invitations by email attracted mostly inactive visitors, and therefore this is not the channel that can be considered effective for multiple growth, despite the fact that it was effective in the early stages of LinkedIn development.
Therefore, it was decided to focus on the channel that has already generated the largest number of active users - on the main page. And it certainly was a wise decision on LinkedIn.
By optimizing the main page, they managed in just four months to generate the same influx of registered users as in two years of optimizing email dispatches.
These figures prove that from the point of view of growth hacking, with the task of multiple growth in the shortest possible time, an emphasis on strengths seems to be much more effective than an attempt to improve "weak spots."
I advise you to read - They will help you find all the "killers" of conversion - 10 reports in Google Analytics
Growth hack second: double viral helix
The value of active users is not so much in their involvement in internal correspondence and communication, but in the fact that they play a critical role in spurring existing inactive users, as well as in attracting new ones.
This effect of viral spread is a major factor in the multiplication of LinkedIn. It is easy to guess why: the x-factor of any network of professional contacts lies in the achievement of the level at which the user can satisfy their needs by finding the contact of the person he needs.
And Hoffman understood that in order to do this he needed to attract as many users as possible to LinkedIn.
According to him, the whole of 2003 was devoted to creating a viral effect of development.
“ Our main problem was how to attract the first million users. First of all, we needed to get a sufficient number of users in order for the contact search or information distribution functionality on the LinkedIn network to make sense, ”Schmuckler says.
Former employees of LinkedIn, who worked for the company at the time, unanimously claim that the viral effect was not an accident or a lucky coincidence.
It was persistent, consistent analysis, optimization, engagement and improvement. LinkedIn even postponed the launch of all paid services until such time as the multiple growth starts due to the viral effect.
In the end, it took 1.5 years.
So what did they do to achieve the necessary viral effect? Easier to list what they did not!
For starters, they literally tested everything. New users were sent welcome letters asking them to invite friends - and at the same time the company tried to find a winning combination to convert the largest number of invitations into new users.
So they discovered that 4 is the ideal number of fields for entering new email addresses for invitations. If there were fewer fields, users simply did not pay attention to them, and if there were more, it bothered them and made them refuse to send invitations.
These and other complex efforts have led to significant, but still slow in terms of "viral" growth. The vast majority of users still had contact with only one LinkedIn user, which meant that they accepted someone's invitation, registered, but were not involved further in the process of forming their own network of contacts, sending invitations, etc.
In fact, only less than a quarter of new users entered their email addresses into forms for sending invitations.
It was at this stage, after analyzing the data, in LinkedIn began work on the concept of importing contacts from email clients. Now this is a common phenomenon, almost must have for any social network, but then in 2004, the function of entering an email address and password in the form on the site with the permission of the network to access all contacts was a fresh, innovative solution.
LinkedIn employees wrote a special plugin for Outlook, which could be installed on a computer and “upload” your contacts to a social network through it.
Yes, today it sounds an anachronism, but imagine what an improvement it was at that time compared to manually entering email addresses!
Only 7% of users who used this feature increased the number of invitations on LinkedIn by more than 30%.
Despite the significant growth of users, caused by all these efforts, the numbers showed that the network of contacts of the majority of users still consisted of only one person.
Other studies have shown that until the decision to register on LinkedIn, the user needed to receive an average of 3.2 letters of invitation.
It was necessary to find an opportunity to reverse this trend, and for this the LinkedIn team decided to use the information that they accumulated in abundance.
When people registered with LinkedIn, one of the first questions they asked was a question about their current position and the company in which they worked. And more than 90% of users answered this question.
LinkedIn used this information to create an additional stream of new contacts and links within the network. As soon as the user registered, he was offered a list of other employees of his company already registered with LinkedIn with the question: “Which of them do you know?”. In order to establish contact, it was only necessary to click the mouse opposite the corresponding surnames.
The introduction of this option has increased the number of contacts being installed. Not stopping there, LinkedIn added questions about the companies in which users worked before. And, again, after entering the company, the user was offered a list of potential contacts of employees from their previous jobs.
The genius of these seemingly uncomplicated innovations was that, in addition to the additional possibilities for establishing contacts between users, this made it possible to create a fundamentally new user profile structure: each module of the information entered was presented as part of the user's professional experience.
And the more people joined the social network, sending requests to contact their current or former colleagues, the more it contributed to the involvement of previously registered but inactive users who received invitations and returned to the site to accept and establish new contacts. .
These efforts have greatly helped launch a viral spread response: the number of page views increased by 41%, the search for new contacts by 33%, and the filling of previous work experience by 38%.
And, despite the fact that the new logic of actions for registering and completing profiles has significantly shifted the process of sending invitations, the number of sent invitations also increased by 16%.
According to a former employee of the company and growth hacking specialist Josh Elman, all these actions led to the effect of the Double Viral Loop.
, , «», , , . , .
!
, LinkedIn, , , , , .
, ( ), .
, 2012, , «» .
, , LinkedIn. , email , .
— 10 A/B
Growth hack : google search
growth hack LinkedIn – google. , 2006 !
LinkedIn.
LinkedIn .
– , . !
LinkedIn , .
google LinkedIn . LinkedIn .
, , . LinkedIn , 2 .
, , LinkedIn , google, , .
, LinkedIn , , , , , , -. , LinkedIn , .
– , LinkedIn.
– , , 12 , , LinkedIn , , , .
, ! , .
, Growth Hacking Linkedin, . They will be grateful for that. And I even more so!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/299116/
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