Assignment 2:
CASE STUDY – Linked
LinkedIn is a social networking website for people in professional jobs. Founded in 2003,
LinkedIn connects the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. With
more than 645+ million members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500
company, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. The company has a diversified
business model with revenue coming from Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, and Premium
Subscriptions products. LinkedIn could be defined as a Multi-Sided Platform. Headquartered in
Silicon Valley, LinkedIn has offices across the globe. Users can make connections with other
people they have worked with, post their work experience and skills, look for jobs, and look for
workers. The site is available in many languages, including most European
languages, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Malay.
Growth was slow at first. In 2005 LinkedIn introduced services that allowed companies to post job
listings and search the network for prospective employees. In addition to these professional
services, LinkedIn allows companies to advertise on the site. In December 2016, Microsoft
completed its acquisition of LinkedIn, bringing together the world’s leading professional cloud
and the world’s leading professional network.
The business model is organized around four pillars:
Talent Solutions: LinkedIn Recruiter allows enterprises and professional organizations to find,
contact and hire highly qualified passive and active candidates based on Advanced searches,
InMail service and Talent Pipeline Management.
Learning & Development: Back in 2015, LinkedIn had bought an online learning company called
Lynda for $1.5 billion. Lynda was integrated into LinkedIn as the learning and
development platform for professionals. In short, subscription members can get access to
thousands of professional courses. Thus, this segment of the business is subscription-based as well.
Marketing Solutions: The marketing solution is the part where LinkedIn uses its member’s user
base to let other businesses advertise their products or services. There are six products in this area:
The last segment is related to the premium subscription’s members.
Premium Subscriptions: The differentiation between the subscription-based model and
advertising model is not as simple as it seems. In fact, within premium subscriptions, you can have
access to advertising features (like InMail Messages); therefore, even though the
LinkedIn business model is mainly subscription-based. That is more diversified. In fact, it is
undeniable that part of the value of the professional network comes from the leverage the
businesses can make of the LinkedIn members’ base.
One of the key aspects of a business model is the customer segment your organization serves,
whom you sell your products or services. LinkedIn gets its overall value by offering services for
both HR managers in need of qualified candidates and professionals looking for career
opportunities. The Learning & Development platform allows LinkedIn members to get more
qualified. Which in turn, increases the value of the hiring services as more qualified people are
available.
Teams are working to keep LinkedIn a safe place for professionals by proactively finding fake
profiles then removing them and any content they share. Prevent 19.5 million fake accounts from
being created at registration. This means the vast majority – 95% – were stopped automatically,
without ever being live on LinkedIn.
Restricting 2 million fake accounts before members reported them and 67,000 following member
reports. This was possible by pairing human review with artificial intelligence and machine
learning and our members who report fake accounts.98% of all fake accounts we prevented or took
down were done so through our automated defenses, including artificial intelligence and machine
learning. The rest were captured through manual review.
Case Study Questions:
1.Which Business model is adopted in LinkedIn? (2 Marks)
2.Give the function of talent solution product in Linked in. (2 Marks)
3.Is the search in Linked In is effective? Reason out. (2 Marks)
4.Specify the ways adopted to prevent fake accounts? (2 Marks)
Note: The answers can be also from other outside trusted resources.
Jermaine Byrant
Nicole Johnson
OVER
RATING
YEARS
