Time spent on a site is one important indication of user engagement, a key factor for advertisers to consider when placing online media buys.
According to The Wall Street Journal, visitors spent about 13 minutes on average at LinkedIn during October, while Facebook users logged about 213 minutes and MySpace users spent 87 minutes.
Which begs the question, why aren’t people spending more time on LinkedIn?
Jackie Nejaime, a San Francisco real-estate agent, uses LinkedIn to stay in touch with her 183-person network, check out job prospects and see if someone might be interested in one of the homes she’s selling. But she typically logs in only a few times a month because she says the site lacks features.
“I would like to get more use out of it,” said Ms. Nejaime “I just don’t know how.” By contrast, the 47-year-old says she uses Facebook every day to touch base with friends and professional contacts.
If you ask me, “I don’t know how” is not an isolated incident, and it’s a serious slam on LinkedIn’s product developers. Digital natives and the technorati might find LinkedIn easy enough to use, but that’s a small market in the grand scheme. If LinkedIn is to become the destination of choice for business networking, the site has to become more intuitive and feature-rich.
Personally, I think LinkedIn’s Groups has some promise, since it’s an easy way to find people working on like problems. For instance, I belong to Marketing Bloggers, Online Reporters and Editors, AIGA Portland, Portland Ad Fed, Franklin & Marshall College Alumni, Green Communicators, and other groups that touch some area of my life.