4 Ways to Make LinkedIn Your Company's Best Friend

Visitors to Websites tailored more toward business professionals than consumers are increasingly choosing to log in using their existing LinkedIn identities, said social tool provider Gigya on Tuesday.

In fact, whereas only three percent of users to such sites chose to sign in using their LinkedIn identities in a Gigya study last July, that number had increased all the way up to 20 percent by January, the company reported this week in a blog post on the topic.

Gigya helps integrate online businesses with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, including providing the technology that enables what it calls "social sign-on," or the ability to sign in using an existing identity from a social network. Gigya technology is used by more than 280 million users each month across more than 500,000 sites, it says.

While it's still more common to see sites that allow visitors to sign in using their existing Facebook and Twitter identities, LinkedIn began providing similar functionality about a year ago. Now, it looks like users of business-oriented Websites are taking full advantage of that capability.

In January, LinkedIn accounted for 27 percent of the social sign-ons at stock market news site SeekingAlpha, Gigya notes, while the Harvard Business Review saw 20 percent of its social sign-ons come through LinkedIn. The Internet Advertising Bureau, meanwhile, saw 14 percent come in that way, Gigya reported.

Companies Large and Small

Gigya also reports some descriptive data about the users who sign in to business-focused sites via LinkedIn. Of particular note are that finance, high-tech, and medical are the industries most often represented, while sales was the most frequently seen job function.

A full 30 percent of the people signing in via LinkedIn came from companies with 1000 or fewer employees, whereas the greatest proportion--41 percent--came from firms with more than 10000.

Read more: Business Center

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