Linkedin's recent acquisition of Pulse is not out of the blues!

Linkedin, a niche social network has made itself exclusive for the professionals. Its one of the biggest features is being the meeting place for all sorts of the world professionals who share, learn & connect with loads of individuals and resources. Since inception in May, 2003,

linkedin has relentlessly been working to evolve as a social network that can add value to individuals’ professional life. A recent (11th April'13) $90 million worth acquisition of Pulse, a network that brings all of your favorite blogs, magazines newspapers quickly to read, share and save in one place for free.

Now many people are raising their eye browses looking for reasons this high profile acquisition. Big business concern like linkedin will never be going to spell out the inner reasons of such acquisition. Here I am not going to conclude whether this acquisition has paid off or not. Time will eventually let us know. But I will be trying to pin point the reasons that have played enough as the motivating factors for this deal.

1. Being in the very niche segment, it is imperative that LinkedIn  requires something more to spice it up for its valued users. Rather than having just profile & few connections with professionals, linkedin looked for, to be more dynamic.

2. Technology is evolving at a faster rate than anything else in the world. From desktop, computer has  now come into the palm of the people. Whatever strategy that social networkers formulate nowadays, each of them will have to have the strategy to be strong on the go i.e be active in the mobile devices.

3.  Among the social net-workers  linkedin wants to be the pioneer of being the repository of all the updated and recent news articles with special emphasize as it has direct impact on peoples’ professional lives.

4. Acquisition of Pulse can aid the users for career advancement by injecting professional insights, knowledge like – it allows users to browse multiple media sources, including social networks, to pick and choose the content they want to  read.

5. 750+ Publishers of 190 countries, will view the network having 200 million + users of linkedin, as a prime destination to release exclusive contents thus the window of mega business opens up.

6. Pulse’s core value proposition is to help foster informed discussions that spark the decisions shaping the world around us through news and information. Linkedin will leverage that in the form of news, influencer posts, industry updates, discussions, comments and many more.  

7. Linkedin is now pretty comfortable in terms of having large number of users 200+ mil and 2+ sign up per second. Now they want to increase users time spend on linkedin both on fixed and mobile platform via  the content of Pulse.

8. Linkedin wants to become the indispensable site for professionals worldwide, whether they're on the go and checking in on their mobile devices, or sitting at their desktop.     

9. It will boost linkedin’s expansion into the smartphone’s & tablets of busy professionals.

10.The shared views of (Publish, Discover & Connect ) of professional information and knowledge can transform lives and the world makes linkedin and Pulse a particularly great fit.

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Professionals turn to the site for trusted recommendations and quality content. With all its changes, though, Linkedin needs to make sure it can stay focused on the social media niche it has so successfully carved out for itself. If it makes too many efforts to connect strangers or bombard users with trivial news updates, it runs the risk of looking too much like the social peers that many LinkedIn users try to avoid.

Courtesy: Technewsworld Social Media Linkedin Blog

Photo: webpronews.com, brandwatch.com, arkovi, allthingsd

Posted in: Review