Future and Defies

Presently, around 29 million users from a total of 45 million users at LinkedIn are from English speaking countries, almost 65% of its total. When we compare with Facebook community, we realize that 70% of their users are not from English speaking countries. According my point of view, 65% of users coming from English speaking countries it is way too much, and LinkedIn should need to an extra effort to grow in other languages as well, offering its services and platform to as many users as possible. Comparing again, we realize that Facebook is translated to 65 languages and MySpace to 15 languages, so something must be done. The work to translate the LinkedIn platform to different languages is not complex and the benefits justify them.

The four countries that most negatively impressed me at LinkedIn, according the number of users were China, Japan, Russia and Korea. Such countries are among the biggest internet users in the world: 338 million, 94 million, 38 million and 37 million respectively, but at LinkedIn combined, those four countries may have less than 600 thousand users. It means that the potential to grown is those languages are huge, and also, we are facing an idiomatic problem. According my point of view, it may justify the investment to translate the platform in those four new languages in order to increase rapidly the presence of more users from those countries. The other language that I would translate, would be the Arab, as more than 41 millions users are connected to the Internet and less than 400 thousand are members.

In few years, I believe that LinkedIn will reach 100 million users and it will become one of the best networking on the Internet, because it will be composed by professionals, adults, well educated and with an important purchasing power, among other unique qualities.