Poll: Will You Have More Business Contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn, in 6 Months?
Most of the comments and trackbacks from my post on LinkedIn confirmed that LinkedIn has momentum as a business social network. However some Facebook fans believe that LinkedIn is only enjoying a temporary time in the sun.
For example Stowe Boyd, a man who knows a thing or two about social media, had this to say:
“Bernard Lunn thinks LinkedIn is in a great spot because 80% of his contacts are there, and Facebook isn’t real for business yet. Wait six months, Bernard.”
I am not sure what Stowe is predicting in six months. However I am interested in prediction markets, so how about we define a specific prediction and then revisit it in six months? If Facebook and/or LinkedIn were public companies, we could test our predictive powers in the stock market with real money. However because they are private companies (for now), we can just do this for fun and bragging rights. Anyway public companies are now all boring, predictable enterprises; we have to recreate the fun in the private markets.
So the prediction, we think, from Stowe is this:
“In 6 months Facebook will have more of your business contacts than LinkedIn”.
We'll check back in 6 months whether that prediction comes true. But for now we'll run a poll to see whether RWW readers think LinkedIn can hold off the Facebook challenge in business networking. Please take a moment to vote in this poll:
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Here's the problem.. and what I've been hearing from a lot of people: I don't want my business contacts on my FaceBook. Personal friends and business friends are two different things entirely, and I think most people have two different faces they show in the different profiles. Unless FaceBook can come up with some smart way to have separate social networks (with separate profiles) under the same login, I don't think LinkedIn has too much to worry about.
Hey, you might want to check out Hobnob if you are interested in utilizing Facebook for business reasons. It allows you to make requests for contacts (with someone else, so for example "a web developer"), and has a whole Q&A section like LinkedIn. Last I heard it's going to have the ability to post your resume to your profile. It looks promising.
To be honest, I think I already have more business contacts in Facebook than in LinkedIn. But I also haven't really spent as much time on building my LinkedIn network as I should have (and have been using Facebook for far longer since I started using it in college).
Facebook does not have much to offer for business networking. Yeah, you can connect with people, but thats about it. LinkedIn has still ways to go, but it is by far my site of choice when it comes to business contacts.
I love Facebook, but lets just say that in my last two companies, both software companies catering to biotech, finding people on Facebook is tough (even for casual networking) and everyone is on LinkedIn. The Valley is NOT the world.
Personally I wouldn't mind putting professional contacts into Facebook if I could differentiate contact type and what kind of information they could see about me (the feed is one problem).
I've got to agree with the first comment. Personally, I think Facebook has a ton of potential, even in the business world. But this is one area where expansion will be hard. Personally, again, I would want to keep this networks completely separate, business from personal information and friends.
I think this speaks to the effectiveness of specialization on the web. Facebook is a great social application. Socializing is it's specialization. LinkedIn is a great business networking application. This is a similar problem we've worked on at http://www.jumpswap.com
Networking with business associates and with friends are two distinct functions, and require different features.
My business contacts really don't need to know that I compared my movie taste with X, or what level zombie I am, and my facebook friends aren't there to look at my CV.
I'm on both linkedin and facebook, each for different reasons, and unless there's a mass migration away from linkedin and it becomes useless, then I guess I plan to stay that way.
Beyond not wanting your business contacts mixed up in facebook, which does not seem to fit the facebook feel. facebook has hardly made any inroads into the international business world while linkedin is everywhere.
Fro every person i meet business wise here in the netherlands there is a 90% chance he or she has a linked in account, regardless their industry. For facebook that same number is probably closer to 5%. That's a big difference to catch up in 6 months.
I predict i will have become so fed up with pirates, beer kegs and zombies in six months that i will have cancelled my Facebook account.
Facebook has been overrun with spam after they added this Facebook applications. Vampire bits, Top Friends, Best movies, Christmas Trees and tons of others. You have to fight them away every day. You can't build a professional business contacts base around that.
Unless Facebook change something, Facebook will still be for the mainstream teenager. Thats the way the advertisers want it.
This happened in November for me. LinkedIn is no longer my preferred online business contact manager. I have 50 more contacts on Facebook.
Latest Nielsen shows LinkedIn growing faster than Facebook. Yes Facebook base is way bigger than LinkeIn, but growth rate matters. This is a nice replay of the original Facebook vs MySpace when Facebook showed faster growth even though MySpace had the base size. Mostly this is law of large numbers, but Facebook having made such a big deal about growth rates will now have to live by growth rates:
http://www.marketingshift.com/2007/11/linkedin-growing-faster-than-facebook.cfm
People's minds quickly associate brands with specific values and concepts.
Facebook = have fun
LinkedIn = get business done
It is easy to be all things to all people from a technology perspective, but extremely difficult from a branding/mindshare perspective.
(Personally, I'm perfectly happy with LinkedIn - although I do think some more social networking features on that would be helpful. I really don't have the time to maintain two lists of business contacts on two separate sites.)
There is something about Facebook and Myspace that reminds me of AOL in that I wonder if these platforms will be the AOL of Web 2.0
@ #12 - You hit the nail on the head! You can't be all things to all people, and Facebook is going to have a hard time appealing to their core demographic (i.e., college kids) while at the same time trying to grow into a more mature audience. Honestly, outside of the valley, there just aren't that many 30-somethings actively using Facebook. Lots of them are signing up to see what the fuss is all about (just like they did with myspace a year or two ago), but once the novelty of reconnecting with some old classmates wears off they never come back.
You all need to remember though that Facebook's core demographic, as you put it #14, is graduating from college and becoming a member of the real world. They are most familiar Facebook, and if the right system is set up, it will be used for business-related actions.
Don't think 5 months from now, think 5 years.
I'm wondering if the folks who find LinkedIn more useful have paid for business accounts? The free account just doesn't give me enough information to tell if I've found a person I know when they aren't already contacts of my contacts. It feels to me like the barrier to finding out if I've even got the right person is lower in Facebook.
I've been on LinkedIn for a while, and have just recently started on Facebook. Initially, I was thinking of keeping the two separate (Facebook for friends/family... LinkedIn for biz contacts).
However, I did notice that Facebook lets you set a limited profile. There are a few people that I am considering adding to Facebook (not full business contacts - like past employers or clients... I'd keep that on LinkedIn). But some people who are middle of the road as far as friend/professional goes.
I like that Facebook lets you select who sees your full profile (with all the apps like SuperPoke and BoozeMail, lol) - that's strictly for friends and family. I'd give limited access to potential business contacts. That way they could see just the main info (contact info, web sites, work and school, etc.)
Not sure where the two will be. I certainly have a lot more Facebook contacts, but these are almost all friends/family. Who knows where this will be at in 6 months?
Personally (and from my informal polls) it's all about worlds. And that most people don't want cross-over from their Personal world into their Professional world.
I have coined this the Costanza Rule to Social Media.
I don't buy the "Facebook consumes the business world" argument. I don't find either Facebook or LinkedIn to be particularly functional from a business social network perspective: Facebook is (as is noted above) very consumer-oriented, and LinkedIn - at least for us "free" users - is more likely to tease you with the idea that it might be really useful, than to deliver really useful features.
On top of that, I find the Facebook approach to selling personal info kind of creepy (in the same way that I dislike seeing Google ads react to gmail content). Given a choice, I'll stick with LinkedIn as a contact repository, and engage in "real" social networking at social media sites (like the one I've recently launched - www.itincanada.ca - and the numerous sites that serve specific functions, such as business analysts, etc.).
That said, there is of course a chance that "choice" will become kind of forced - either by an overwhelming number of new graduates opting for a Facebook-only approach to social networking, or because more staid organizations decide to orient online activities towards Facebook in the hopes of looking "more hip" in the eyes of the younger people whose business and/or talents they covet...
The number of contacts might be a valid measure. Or the amount of contact. Or the value you add for others. Or what you gain from participating on one site or the other.
If you have 500 contacts on LinkedIn, but you're getting better interaction with people on Facebook, then it doesn't matter where you have more contacts.
This is a nice replay of the original Facebook vs MySpace when Facebook showed faster growth even though MySpace had the base size