The FINANCIAL — Professional business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn counts 1,915 users in Georgia, out of which 186 are companies and the rest – outstanding individuals and businesslike people, according to information obtained by The FINANCIAL.
Regionally Azerbaijan is leading with 2,478 users, out of which 174 are companies while in Armenia there are 1,956 users out of which 216 are companies.
The registered users maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business, promote their products on international markets, post jobs, form partnerships and make people visible in the net. LinkedIn serves this purpose as it is an online network of more than 40 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 170 industries.
LinkedIn overall has more than 65 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
The FINANCIAL interviewed Noam Kostucki, social media trainer and consultant for businesses in UK and Poland, as well as the managing director of Seeeducation.
As Kostucki told The FINANCIAL LinkedIn can be more useful for businesses when there are at least 100,000 people registered on it, and it mainly depends on social networks entering Georgian culture. As less than 2,000 people currently use it in Georgia, the focus of using LinkedIn is to reach the international market.
“As LinkedIn is an international business platform, Georgian companies and individuals need to understand better the international opportunities, have higher margins, expand the pool of customers and talents and be ready to stay competitive on the world market,” said Kostucki.
The importance of LinkedIn is accessing a market that would have normally been extremely expensive to enter by increasing their reach to clients outside of Georgia.
“There are a number of ways of promoting your company on LinkedIn, let’s say you have a business related to agriculture and want to promote your product internationally through LinkedIn. First you find the competitors in the UK for instance who would be interested in buying your products, then you start a group about how and what makes a cheap high quality product in agriculture and join groups related to agriculture. Then you show your expertise in the field of agriculture by answering questions, putting relevant articles online, kick starting conversation around your expertise so people start to see your company as an expert in the field. As you help people and make some buzz around yourself they’ll trust your company because you helped them for free, so they decide to visit your website and then realize you sell cheaper and better quality products. Afterwards they’ll forward your links to their friends, and talk about how you helped them solve their problems, that's how social media works” Kostucki told The FINANCIAL.
“One reason for why Georgian companies may be refraining from using LinkedIn is that they may be solely focused on selling their products which is a hard nut to crack from the very beginning. In the UK companies use LinkedIn because they focus on helping their potential customers and building relations with them so that the day they need to buy the service, or their friend needs to buy the services / products, they buy it from you,” said Kostucki.
“LinkedIn won’t sell anything to Facebook or Twitter but each of these will put your company on the internet map as 82% of internet usage is on Social Media so if your company is not on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, it’s missing 82% of internet traffic,” said Kostucki.
The FINANCIAL also found out how Georgian companies used social networking.
Beqa Gonashvili, a ministry official and head of the Georgian Sheep Association said to The FINANCIAL that with the help of Facebook he sold 75,000 sheep to the Middle East from just one investor bid. “I’m contacted by businesses in Iran, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia on average 4-5 times a month interested in buying sheep,” said Beqa Gonashvili.
As well as the Middle East our sheep are shipped to Armenia too,” said Beqa Gonashvili.
“I find Facebook quite helpful in this regard, as I opened an account 1.5 year ago and have more than 1,000 friends now. LinkedIn is also useful due to the fact that we have our company profile which investors and other businesspeople review daily,” said Gonashvili.
David Birman, an outstanding figure in the sphere of marketing and advertising told The FINANCIAL that usage of LinkedIn in Georgia is negligible and not used appropriately in most of cases.
“Currently all of the businesses are in the process of building their networks and have not reached recruitment activities yet. One reason may be the costs associated with job posting which is 195 USD per posting visible for 30 days. The only exception as far as I know was Georgian Bank who put one vacancy on LinkedIn and found several relevant candidates, and it turned out to be a successful step by Bank of Georgia.
“I think that the future of LinkedIn in Georgia is dismal at least in the short-run because most of the businesses are represented on Facebook. I personally use LinkedIn as an internet CV where I have uploaded my work experience, for how long and at what positions I worked. I find it helpful to have a short CV as a Mail attachment and another more detailed one in the internet on LinkedIn,” said Mr David Birman.
“As for the companies’ relationship with social networks I can take the 2004-05 example when Magti and Geocell were interacting with their subscribers on a forum and the scheme was built on such a high level that they were solving problems more effectively than on a hot line. As a result they created their online community” said Birman.
“Nowadays many companies are trying to build their company profile on Facebook but the majority does it spontaneously, without planning and overall ends up placing themselves on social networks but having almost no marketing effect at all,” Birman told The FINANCIAL
Singular Group is also effectively using social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn. “As we mainly create services that are based on mobile and internet users, social networks take the lead in this regard to be our core partner due to the fact that usage of internet has increased over a couple of years out of which social networks are the core activity of internet users,” said Giorgi Shamugia, founder and executive director at Singular group.
We effectively use LinkedIn in building our contacts, for instance during the iTV conference, involvement of social media was very high, especially that of LinkedIn. With its help we found outstanding speakers from the United Kingdom. We also updated our news on Facebook and Twitter. Frankly speaking the iTV conference was widely communicated through social media.
According to a study published at the end of January 2010, Nielsen observed the online social activity of consumers around the world and discovered an 82% increase in time spent on social networking sites in December 2009. On average, users spent more than five and a half hours on popular networks such as Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn, in December 2009. In December 2008, users clocked just over three hours on social networking sites.
The audience for social networks also increased year-on-year for the last three years, reaching an estimated audience of over 300 million according to Nielsen.
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