I will preface this entire post by saying that I love LinkedIn. I love that it’s all professional. I love that it’s clean, white, and boring in design. I love that I can see who has viewed my profile—at least, in what industry—and then guess at why they were looking at me. I hate when random people I don’t know on LinkedIn attempt to connect to me. That defeats the purpose! To me, LinkedIn is legit.
So when I landed a part-time gig as a community manager for BeKnown, job search giant Monster.com’s networking site within facebook, I was a little wary. I’m not a huge facebooker. I like keeping personal and professional separate online. I separate people into groups on facebook and control their privacy settings like crazy (sorry, anyone who is reading this and doesn’t get to see much of my profile—it’s for your own good!).
BeKnown, however, essentially does this group-sorting and privacy-protecting for me. I can connect with people I’m not friends with on facebook through BeKnown—while staying within facebook. The ability to stay on one site and use the same interface is a huge bonus.
BeKnown also has the incredible capacity to socially refer friends to and for jobs. That is the crux of BeKnown’s innovation, and as more and more users join (there were already 108,000 just 7 days post-launch), that ability will become priceless. Well, and possibly profitable for refers: you could actually earn money, real money, for referring connections to a job.
I think there’s good reason to be on both: generational differences. Check it:
- Of 600 million people on Facebook, 72% are between 25 and 54.
- LinkedIn users are 35-54.
- 91 percent of college seniors have a Facebook profile—but less than one-quarter currently use Facebook as a job-search tool.
- Only 1.1% of college grads find LinkedIn helpful in their job search.
- The average FB user logs into their page 1-2 times/day while the avg LinkedIn user logs in once every 2-3 weeks.
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