101. LinkedIn Shares fall off a Cliff!

Now that we have passed 100 episodes, I thought it was time to give LinkedInformed a makeover. You will notice we have a new logo and the introduction music is different but more importantly we have a new format for the show.

I will no longer have a specific news section but I will obviously always talk each week about any important events that have occurred, if nothing important has happened I will focus the episode on a specific subject.

This will never be an interview show as such but I do plan to conduct more interviews from now on.

I hope you like the changes.

Main Story

This week I focussed my attention on LinkedIn’s Q4 and full year financial results.

A quick overview

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• Q4 revenue increased by 34% (vs 2014 Q4) to $862m and that brought the full year to $2,991.
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• Talent solutions contributed 62% of revenue (this includes Lynda) compared to 57% last year
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• Talent solution showed a 32% increase on last year - mainly coming from the field sales team.
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• Online job postings continued to drop.
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• Marketing solutions contributed 21% of revenue achieving a growth of 20% (25% last year)
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• Sponsored updates are effectively holding this revenue stream up, showing growth of 85%!
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• Display advertising continues to plummet, now only contributing 15% (30% last year)
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• Lead Accelerator product has failed and will be retired this year.
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• Premium subscriptions (including sales solutions) contributed 17% of the revenue
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• Sales Navigator is the only bright light in this revenue stream and now represents 38% of all premium subscriptions.
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• More than half of Sales Navigator sales are generated by the field sales team.
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• As a results Sales Solutions will now be reported separately (at last!)
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• General subscriptions have fallen to an all time low, single digit % growth.
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You can read the full report here.

Here are a variety of articles about the results;

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• LinkedIn stock plummets 43% on tepid outlook
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• SHAREHOLDER ALERT: Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC Announces Investigation of LinkedIn Corporation
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• Five Reasons LinkedIn Had Its Worst Day Ever
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• I also mentioned this article from Itai Leshem
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When talking about the results I also mentioned a report in the FT about how Glass door may be thinking about competing with LinkedIn.

Cool Thing

This weeks cool thing is a Google Chrome extension called ‘LinkedIn Connection Revealer’

As you can see, this handy tool allows you to see how many followers (not connections) your first tier connection has. I’m not sure why it only works for connections because you can see followers for all LinkedIn users by going to their ‘View recent activity’ but it’s still pretty cool anyway.

And best of all….it’s FREE!

You can download it from the Chrome store here

LinkedIn A F Q

Question - I have posted a status update to inform people about my up coming training course. I would like to be able to send a note to specific members of my network to share it. I've had people do it with me but I can't see how. Any tips on how to share it with them?

Answer - Rather annoyingly you can't do it that way for an image update, You are only able to send status updates directly to people if they are web link updates or just font updates. For some reason an image update does not allow this option.

My suggestion would be to produce an update linked to the page that promotes your training event on your website or perhaps Eventbrite and then you will be able to send it to your connections.

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.