The battle for Offsite in Europe: LinkedIn vs. Xing and Viadeo

With a few exceptions, most notably in Russia, Facebook is now the dominant player in Offsite (aka ”Social Media”) in Europe. However, even though Facebook may have ”won” the battle for our private time for now (rest assured, something new will arrive to pick up the gauntlet in the future), when it comes to what we do professionally, the fight for Offsite dominance is still very much alive. Despite LinkedIn closing in on 200m registered users worldwide, it's facing stiff competition in some key European markets. Let’s look at a few examples of what is happening using search volume data from Google Trends to highlight user intent in some of the major European countries.

France

After being the dominant player for many years, Viadeo, with a current base in France of some 6 million registered users, could be under pressure from LinkedIn for the top spot in 2013. It could be that LinkedIn has already caught up with Viadeo, but it’s too early to dismiss Viadeo from your entire online presence when doing business in France. 

Germany

In Germany, the pattern is different: Here it seems that Xing, the market leader in German-speaking countries, is managing to keep its leading position over LinkedIn and on November 15^th 2012, Xing announced that it had passed 6 million members in Germany, Austria and Switzerland combined (with more than 0.5 million members each in Austria and Switzerland indicating roughly 5 million members in Germany). So, Xing will have to be on your radar for the foreseeable future if you’re doing business in Germany (Austria and Switzerland, see below).

Austria

The pattern is the same as in Germany, with Xing ahead, but LinkedIn seems to be gaining in popularity.

Switzerland

Switzerland is interesting, because, on the surface, LinkedIn passed Xing in popularity two years ago.

That is probably true in terms of total users. However, suppose you look at searches by region. In that case, it’s evident that Xing is still a factor to be reckoned with in the German-speaking region and that LinkedIn is relatively weaker there, while Viadeo is still relevant in the French-speaking region.

Xing

Viadeo

Linkedin

To round off, we should mention that LinkedIn is the dominant player across Europe. However, with this, we would like to emphasise that LinkedIn is still (in 2013) by no means the only professional network touch point you need to be considering. If you want to discuss what Offsite strategy is best applied to your business needs, feel free to contact us at Zooma!