Adgully Exclusive | Key focus will be mobile platform: LinkedIn's Arvind Rajan

Gone are the days when one used to bank on word-to-mouth source to make a progress in the business.

In this day and age the Social Networking is turning out to be a perfect foil for the professionals to expand their business.

LinkedIn, the professional networking site, proves just that. LinkedIn has more than 14 million users in India. India is the second largest user base for LinkedIn, next only to US, which has 45 per cent of the company's total 135 million users across the world.

LinkedIn is fourteenth-largest website in India, in terms of page views, according to comScore, an Internet marketing research firm.

Whether your business is small or big, it can no longer ignore this social media trend and customers do expect you to have an online presence.

Ask Arvind Rajan, Managing Director and Vice ' President, Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), LinkedIn and he would tell you that it's about leveraging the connection to reach out to a larger audience. "These days people aren't just taking the message that the market is delivering ' all those people are basically trying to leverage their connection so dramatically that they can reach out to a larger section," he says.

With more than 150 million professional world wide and 14 million professionals in India itself using LinkedIn, it's not surprising to see the brand constantly innovating itself ' coming up with new and innovative method to stay ahead of the pack.

One such is the LinkedIn Cardmunch and other is LinkedIn Today. "LinkedIn Cardmunch is a smart iPhone application which turns the business card into contacts. You take a picture with the app and your business card gets converted to a contact automatically and will also show you the LinkedIn profile information and connections you have in common," explains Rajan.

"While the idea behind "LinkedIn Today' came from this concept that there is such volume of information that's available so it's hard for you to figure out which one is relevant. We realized that the best way to figure out which one need more attention would be to see what your peers are doing," explains Rajan.

"For example, anytime someone shares an article on LinkedIn, or goes to 300,000 articles that are there on the site, with each "share', I know who they are. So I would know this is what my friends are sharing, this is what my company is sharing or this is what people in my functional area are sharing.

"So it act as a valuable of news digest for you ' relevant piece of information that you can get every morning and evening. So it has become quite a powerful medium as now-a-days B2B websites have realized that LinkedIn is the biggest source of traffic," he adds.

With growing competition, LinkedIn have made specific plans in the coming year ' one of them being targeting the mobile audience.

"One of the big things that we looking to invest are mobile segment ' mobile is huge for every company these days and it's big for us as well," says Rajan.

"Our mobile growth rate this year has been 350% and we are seeing it as a huge source of investment, especially in south-east Asia."