Liz O’Donnell, Director, International, LinkedIn swung by India recently and she was gushing about the success of the professional networking site in the country. “There are over one million members of the site with India given as their country of residence”, she said. That is the site’s second-largest international user base after the United Kingdom, and O’Donnell predicts that within the year, India will exceed the UK and be second only to the US, which still accounts for half of LinkedIn’s approximately 25 million user base.Explaining why she was in India, O’Donnell spoke about how the site was looking at expanding its reach in India and also looking at ways of leveraging advertising opportunities here. “We offer advertisers an extremely targeted demographic”, she said. Unlike other networking sites, LinkedIn does know about the industry that its members work in. “So if say, a car company wants to advertise to lawyers and dentists and we can deliver those demographics to them.” In fact, O’Donnell spoke about how the site is looking for new opportunities in India for both tie-ups and advertising.
“I would like to think that we are a different sort of networking site, we don’t crowd our pages with applications”, she says, but added that LinkedIn would soon start offering some applications to its users. And she also says that the site does not encourage ‘number games’, “If you look closely you will see that once people cross 500 connections we just put 500+”, she mentions, “Not that we don’t encourage connections, but making contacts for numbers is plain silly.”
Track with co.mments
