LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner explained on the company’s first earnings call a few weeks ago that the company is planning to make a big investment in its mobile strategy. Today, the professional social network is bringing a significant update to its mobile apps, including a new iPhone, Android and mobile web apps.
LinkedIn Mobile is growing 400% year-over-year in terms of users, and LinkedIn says that because of this engagement, the company’s mobile apps needed to be tweaked to reflect a better user experience. The network has re-organized its iPhone and Android applications around 4 areas—Updates, Inbox, your profile, and groups. You could search for and access updates, your inbox, profile and connections from the previous versions of the iPhone and Android app, but the ability to browser and interact with your groups and add connections through LinkedIn’s ‘people you may know’ feature is new.
So in the apps, which have a much cleaner and simpler interface, you’ll see four main options. You can view updates from your network and top news from social aggregator LinkedIn Today; view your invitations and messages, access your profile, connections, and share updates; and browse and interact with your groups, as well as build your network through the People You May Know feature.
LinkedIn said that the Update stream is the most used area of its mobile apps, so this feature has become more prominent within the apps. And Groups was one of the most requested feature in the mobile app experience, and users can now access the list of groups they are members of, browse discussions, and start new discussions or commenting on existing ones.
Across the board, LinkedIn says the new mobile apps are between two and ten times faster across all features, including search and the update stream. And LinkedIn, like many other companies, is betting on HTML5 with its new mobile website, which includes much of the same functionality as the native apps.
With north of a 120 million members, LinkedIn is no doubt growing pretty fast post-IPO. And with this engagement and the launch of news aggregator LinkedIn Today, the network’s mobile apps need to meet with this demand.
