By Jay Greene 

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Josh Frank spent nearly 11 years building up a virtual Rolodex of more than 700 LinkedIn contacts.

But when he recently sought guidance on expanding his Detroit online marketing consultancy, Mr. Frank turned to the e-commerce groups he belongs to on Facebook and the messaging service Slack. He visits LinkedIn about once a month, he says, mainly to research potential clients.

"If I'm looking for honest feedback, I'm going to go to places where the circles are tighter," Mr. Frank says.

For LinkedIn Corp. to justify the $27 billion that Microsoft Corp. paid for it in 2016, the professional social network must convince its 546 million members that it is more than a place to find jobs or pitch customers.

Just 18% of LinkedIn members used the service daily in April 2016, according to Pew Research's most recent look at the service's usage in November 2016, a month before Microsoft closed the deal. That's down from 21% a year earlier.

What's more, more than half of members, 51%, used LinkedIn every few weeks or less often, Pew found. By comparison, 76% of Facebook Inc. members used the service at least daily, Pew found.

At the time of the deal, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said one goal was to weave together the tools people use to get their jobs done and professional networks that connect workers.

To achieve that end, LinkedIn needs members such as Mr. Frank to engage more frequently, updating their job titles, contacts, career achievements and more -- data crucial to Microsoft's plans to integrate its expensive acquisition. Microsoft wants to pump that data into artificial-intelligence offerings, business-software services and even its Office productivity tools, such as its Outlook email and calendar programs.

Artificial intelligence could help Microsoft's Dynamics business play catch-up to Salesforce.com Inc. To that end, Microsoft is using LinkedIn data to help sales representatives target fertile prospects, critical in the so-called customer-relationship management market that Gartner Inc. estimates hit $39.4 billion last year.

Microsoft has started to infuse Office apps with LinkedIn data about contacts, so meeting attendees learn about one another directly from calendar invitations. The company hopes that level of integration will give its venerable franchise a leg up against Alphabet Inc.'s Gmail.

Applying artificial-intelligence algorithms to LinkedIn data could create new revenue opportunities for Microsoft, said Goldman Sachs & Co. analyst Heather Bellini. "This is a company that has different ways to monetize than it used to," she said.

LinkedIn is about to roll out a passel of features aimed at drawing people regularly. For the past year, its engineers have worked on Project Agora, revamping everything from the site's news feed to the service that lets members message one another.

This spring, LinkedIn will add an "interest panel" to members' home pages that will include groups they've joined and hashtags they've followed -- features intended to keep members coming back to learn the latest on topics that matter to them. By summer, LinkedIn will add content from groups into news feeds and notify members of such posts. That way, members will see posts that are related to their interests and won't be put off by posts from connections with whom they have little in common.

Still, it is a steep challenge to get members to carve out more time for the service, particularly if they turn to LinkedIn only when looking for work or seeking out sales leads, said TJ Keitt, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

"There are a ton of people that don't have an immediate need to engage with it," Mr. Keitt said.

The goal of Project Agora, named after the public meeting spaces in ancient Greece, is to convince members that LinkedIn is also a place to hone professional skills, find mentors and share knowledge to solve business problems.

"We need to make LinkedIn a place where people talk to one another," said Kiran Prasad, vice president of LinkedIn Product, who leads the project.

Mr. Prasad recognizes the challenge of changing people's perceptions of LinkedIn as just a place to look for new job opportunities. "I don't think we're under an illusion that it's going to happen on day one," he said.

Recent efforts to boost engagement, such as adding videos to help professionals learn new skills and editorially curated content tailored in part to members' industries, are working, said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's chief executive.

LinkedIn said "sessions," which track each time members use the service more than 30 minutes after their prior activity, have grown more than 20% for five consecutive quarters. LinkedIn declined to give more specific data.

"Engagement has started to meaningfully accelerate for the first time in a long time," Mr. Weiner said.

Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 16, 2018 08:14 ET (12:14 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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