Every so often during one of my training session an individual will ask “What about other networking sites?”

The frequency of that question led me to putting a standard slide into my introduction talks…

LinkedIn is the #1 professional networking site

So here’s a list of popular networking sites*:

MySpace 117 million users
Facebook 90 million users
LinkedIn 25 million users
XING 5 million users
Plaxo 1.5 million users
Ryze .25 million users
Ecademy .15 million users

So you can see - MySpace and Facebook remain above LinkedIn, but no other professional networking site is within reach. (Please - leave a comment with information if you see something else I’m missing)

Got fans?

If you have a fan base, the more social MySpace and Facebook may be good for you. Usually I’m working with professionals and these sites don’t fit as well.

Only time for one site

This is my deal breaker - I have only enough time to work with one networking site, so I’m staying with LinkedIn. I’m not interested in replicating the environment over on one or more other sites, I just can’t manage it all.

Your mileage may vary

It is quite possible the that “best” networking site is just adding it’s 1000th user, and nobody’s aware of it - that may be - when a site does all of what I want and does it better than LinkedIn, and makes me think I’ll be able to bring over the solid base of support I have on LinkedIn, I’ll consider it - but until then, I’m not budging.

If you’d like to convince me otherwise, please try;-)

To your continued success with LinkedIn,

steve

* Here’s some reference links for the chart above - MySpace info from this businessweek article; Facebook info from this page; Xing info from this web article; Plaxo info from this cnet web site. [I was unable to readily access numbers for Ryze and Ecademy, so those are from the best information available]