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Jeffrey « Jeff » Weiner, chief executive officer of LinkedIn Corp., speaks during a Bloomberg West television interview at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in May 2013. After making a series of changes to LinkedIn’s business model last year Weiner successful turned the company into a marketing tool more than a recruiting tool.
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Michael del Castillo
Upstart Business Journal Technology Innovation Editor
LinkedIn’s backbone is no longer Talent Solutions, the tools recruiters use to identify the perfect talent for their company, according to a Forbes report today. Instead, the social network for professionals has become a marketing behemoth, thanks to a couple of key moves by Jeff Weiner, the Mountain View-based company’s co-founder and CEO.
From the Forbes piece:
In a conference call with investors late Thursday, Weiner highlighted a variety of growth initiatives in Marketing Solutions. Among them: rapid growth in « sponsored updates, » in which companies pay extra to show news, analysis or other content to likely job candidates. He said such material now accounts for about one-third of Marketing Solutions revenue. He also said that LinkedIn’s $170 million acquisition of Bizo last year now gives the company the tools needed to provide marketers with a more sophisticated and fully integrated way of reaching customers
The changes boosted LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions department by 56 percent, making it a bigger part of the companies total revenue than Talent Solutions, which still grew impressively by 41 percent, according to the report.
Before going public in 2011, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) raised $206 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and others. Since opening at $45 a share, the company’s stock has grown to $271. Today alone, the $33.7 billion company saw its stock increase 14 percent.
Michael del Castillo is the technology and innovation reporter at Upstart Business Journal, a member of American City Business Journals. A graduate of Columbia University, his work has appeared in the New Yorker. He is also the cofounder of Literary Manhattan, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Manhattan’s literary community and creating new ways to appreciate literature.