LinkedIn, the world’s largest social network for professionals, filed for an IPO this week. The move has made it the no-doubt most talked about technology company and the Wall Street Journal even referred to its shares as “America’s sweetheart tech stock.”
Many people find it hard to categorize LinkedIn because it’s unlike other social networks. It’s not Facebook, which people use to share personal information, to be sure. LinkedIn encourages people to build profiles limited to information about their professional lives only, and share the profiles by connecting to business contacts. Perhaps the most helpful use of LinkedIn is when a user is looking for a new job, and can use the site to market him or herself to potential employers and contacts who may refer them for jobs. But professionals also use LinkedIn to connect for their current company’s benefit. To identify appropriate contacts to forge partnerships.
So for a network admin, how do you think about LinkedIn? It’s not particularly bandwidth intensive, so it likely won’t slow your network. Do you feel compelled to restrict access during the workday because it’s a productivity inhibitor? Or do you see it as a business tool your users should be able to use freely?
We took a look at visits to LinkedIn during a one work-week period in May, Monday through Friday, in the United States, and the results were surprisingly consistent. (Time zones were normalized.) Overwhelmingly people visit LinkedIn the most between 8 am and 4 pm, with a dramatic decline during non-working hours.
There are several ways to interpret this data, but one thing is clear: people use LinkedIn during the workday. And almost exclusively during the workday. My expectation was that the numbers would point to more evening usage – folks spending non-work time polishing up their profiles and making connections, but that is clearly not the case. Next week we’ll take a look at Facebook visits and compare LinkedIn with Facebook. Perhaps some patterns will emerge…
For now you can better understand LinkedIn usage on your network during the workday by visiting your OpenDNS dashboard and checking for the site among your top domains.
Photo from IT-Networks.com.
Kenneth
Probably recruiters looking for resources to spam.
posted on May 26th, 2011 at 2:48 pm
Morgan Schulz
I’m probably nit-picking here, but I bet your data comes from opendns itself. I know a lot of people use opendns at home, but I use it at 6 different computer labs, all of which are primarily open during business hours. I would want to see these data normalized for overall opendns trends (i.e. 73% of all opendns traffic occurs during business hours, so let’s account for that in any derivative statistics)
posted on May 26th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Friday Five – May 27, 2011 | Punaro.com
[...] – How people really use LinkedIn: The truth is in the numbers [OpenDNS Blog] We took a look at visits to LinkedIn during a one work-week period in May, Monday [...]
posted on May 27th, 2011 at 1:37 pm
William Jimenez
Facebook is definitely going to be a high usage during the work day….I see it at my office as one of the top 10 domains visited (frequency) at times.
That’s even more interesting to think about. The relevance/value to a person at work is much less for Facebook than LinkedIn. You can argue a number of legitimate uses for LinkedIn in the workplace, Facebook has much fewer.
posted on May 27th, 2011 at 2:23 pm
RotBlitz
My corporation (several thousand employees, US based but multi-national) even encourages us to use LinkedIn. Almost all other social networking sites are blocked in the corporation, with the exception of LinkedIn. Many employees are registered there and use it during working hours around the world. No problem at all.
posted on June 1st, 2011 at 3:58 am
john
I would view the data as people having more free time to access a ‘free’ network to do whatever on linkedin and or facebook and are probably too absorbed to want to do this on ‘their’ time and would rather just hang out with non virtual friends in the real world, thus spending their ‘real time’ with their ‘real friends’ from fb and spend company time on other social networking sites such as linkedin and fb.
This is just my opinion.
posted on June 6th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
LinkedIn conecta 100 milhões de profissionais « Radar Digital
[...] Segundo o Tecnoblog, a rede é mais usada no horário de trabalho – cálculo realizado pela OpenDNS, tradicional empresa de resolução de DNS. Durante uma semana, em maio de 2011, eles registraram a quantidade de acesso dos americanos ao site do LinkedIn, resultado no gráfico abaixo. “As pessoas usam o LinkedIn durante o horário comercial. E quase exclusivamente durante o horário de trabalho”, afirma Allison Rhodes, do departamento de Comunicação da OpenDNS. [...]
posted on June 22nd, 2011 at 4:27 pm