LinkedIn Has 300 Million Registered Users, Mobile Use on Rise

LinkedIn recently announced that it now has more than 300 million registered users, about two-thirds of which are based outside the United States. While the company has not specified how many of the 300 million are active monthly users, it reported 139 million monthly unique visitors and 48 million Slideshare visitors for the fourth quarter of 2013. During that same period, LinkedIn noted that 41 percent of its traffic came from mobile devices, a percentage it expects to continue increasing.

“The company expects that to tip over to a majority sometime this year,” reports The Next Web. “LinkedIn says mobile traffic brings in 15 million profile views, 1.45 million job views and 44,000 job applications every day across 200 countries.”

LinkedIn has initiated a massive training effort to equip its engineers for mobile development. According to Kiran Prasad, LinkedIn’s senior director of engineering for mobile, there are three parts to LinkedIn’s Mobilize initiative. TNW lists the three components:

  • The company has moved to a multi-app strategy that views its collective mobile offerings as a suite of apps for its users. New products such as the new Slideshare Android app offer functionality for specific use cases. The approach is similar to Facebook, which has started to break out features, such as messaging, into standalone applications. In designing its apps, LinkedIn uses a “five-second rule.” If users can’t understand what an app does in the first five seconds after opening it, then it’s too complex.
  • LinkedIn is conducting company-wide training for iOS, Android, and HTML and Javascript mobile Web development. A quarter of its engineers have gone through the courses, while non-engineers can also receive training in mobile UI and product management.
  • The company has spent the past couple years building up discrete databases, dubbed Super Blocks, for managing major objects such as profiles, companies and job listings. Then, it constructed a pipe system, called Rest.li, for connecting its mobile apps with these databases. LinkedIn has also invested resources in internal mobile SDKs to get its applications to collaborate.

Prasad notes that LinkedIn is working on simultaneously shipping across both mobile and desktop, as opposed to the mobile-first approach taken by many companies today. LinkedIn is planning several more releases for this year and 2015.

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