LinkedIn is a professional network often used as corporate recruitment platform. LinkedIn earns money of its users’ connections by selling data and application services to recruiters and ´hiring solutions’. LinkedIn is the strongest player its field (strength). Recruiters are prepared to spend a lot of money to find the ‘right person’ (strength). The scope of LinkedIn and its strong position is supported by a strong market demand for professional social network sites (strength). However, LinkedIn-users are just a limited population (40+, white collar, college degrees) while the world population is getting younger (weakness).
Facebook is a social network which is build on ‘sharing-and-communicating’. Facebook-users are stimulated to share as much as possible sometimes even ‘over-sharing’ (strength/weakness). Facebook generates 10% of its revenue from Facebook Platform. Advertiser are another source of revenue for Facebook which is a $350-400 billion market (strength) but risky market (weakness). Facebook’s platform allows for many business models (strengths). E.g., it could try to attract more developers for travel applications, but also for recruiting applications
BranchOut saw the growing opportunities of LinkedIn and have combined that with the fact that many people are already Facebook-users. BranchOut is an application that allows Facebook-users to create a professional network from all your Facebook friends. This is an additional strength for Facebook.
