LinkedIn wants consumers to connect more often

There's nothing like a little competition to bring out the best in all of us. LinkedIn has been around for a long time, but it's being overshadowed by Facebook and other social networking sites. Now LinkedIn has a plan to ratchet up its business and get its users to spend more time on the site.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, a former executive at Yahoo, took over LinkedIn a year ago with a mandate to reinvigorate the site. LinkedIn's membership reached nearly 54 million at the end of November, up from 32 million a year ago.

However, it's been dwarfed by Facebook which clocks more than 350 million members. And visitors spend much more time on Facebook (about 213 minutes a day) than on LinkedIn (about 13 minutes a day), according to Wall Street Journal.

LinkedIn is "not really a community as much as a collection" of names, said Brigantine Advisors analyst Colin Gillis. "They are definitely in danger of losing the business-networking market."

Weiner is about to change all that.

He recently opened LinkedIn's site to third-party developers so they can create applications that will draw professional users to the site when they aren't looking for work. Weiner wants developers to target specific interest groups, and he wants to keep the site professionally oriented.

"The more relevant those experiences, the more likely our membership will be to engage in those experiences," Weiner told WSJ, adding that LinkedIn has already received requests from 1,500 developers for access to the site's programming interfaces.

For more on LinkedIn's new plans:
- see this Wall Street Journal article

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