LinkedIn Business Social Network goes Public: A Social Gold Rush?

LinkedIn – one of the largest social network for business professionals – has finally gone public on May 19, 2011. The business social network is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. How’s the Initial Public Offering going so far?

LinkedIn (under the symbol of LNKD) offered 7.8 million shares, priced at $45/share.

Will LinkedIn spark a social gold rush? So far, so good. LNKD is traded at $92.50 – $107.00 a share today, and that’s a good start.

Let’s take a closer look at LinkedIn as a business

Just in case you didn’t know, LinkedIn makes money – a lot. The income derives from premium services subscription, ad placements, recruiting services and marketing services.

According to Entrepreneur.com, LinkedIn employs 1,000 people worldwide in 2011. Their premium service subscribers comprise of ALL Fortune 500 executives and more. LinkedIn recruiting solutions were utilised by 73 of Fortune 100 companies (as of March 2011.) Promising.

LinkedIn expects to generate $146 million from the IPO – that’s a good amount of money to improve and expand; not bad for a 9-year-old social networking site that was started in LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s living room.

What would LinkedIn competitors do?

One thing for sure, LinkedIn IPO is being closely monitored by its competitor, mainly Facebook – to see how things go after the IPO.

With LinkedIn stock prices look good in the first 2 days since the IPO, I believe Matt Zuckerberg knows what he should do – to create yet another social gold rush (I don’t know how about you, but if Facebook went public, I would grab some shares!) However, my non-expert eyes see that Facebook need to settle privacy issues and implement more ways to generate revenue in addition to the Facebook ad programs.

Twitter, StumbleUpon, and the rest would also monitor how the IPO goes. Groupon? The group buying site is considering to go public, expecting to raise $15 billion after they rejected Google’s acquisition offer of $6 billion. So, LinkedIn IPO success is encouraging for everybody.

So, will you buy LinkedIn shares? Share your thoughts!

So, has LinkedIn sparked social gold rush? I’m not sure as we do need to look at the trends. LNKD has only traded for 2 days, and I do think it’s too early to say whether it’s a success or not.

Again, I’m not an expert in this, so I am eager to know your opinion regarding LinkedIn IPO. Is it a smart move? Will you buy LinkedIn shares? Share your opinion by commenting on this article!

Ivan Widjaya
On social gold rush sparked by LinkedIn IPO