The State of Global Professional Networking [2014]

In preparing for a webinar with the US Department of State next week, I was curious about the current state of international professional networking sites. The question I have is this: Is it still worth joining and networking on country specific professional social media sites?

So I ran some Google Trends data and wasn’t surprised to see LinkedIn quickly catching up with traditionally strongly held regional networks, Viadeo in France, Xing in Germany and VKontakte in Russia.

From this data, it looks like LinkedIn has overtaken Viadeo in France overall. However there are some regions that seem to prefer Viadeo, namely Rhone/Alps and Ile-de-france.

In Germany, although LinkedIn is widely adopted, Xing still maintains a majority for all major areas.

Oddly, in Moscow, LinkedIn has a search volume of 42 whereas the native VKontakte only has 33. However, the rest of Russia still seems to prefer VKontakte. Just keep in mind that VKontakte is not a professional site, per say, so this comparison might not be fair.

Taking a look at the global interest, if you are looking to cover all your bases, LinkedIn is clearly the best choice for overall traffic volume spread out among the widest net of countries. Area specific networks are great if those are the countries you want to work for, but probably won’t help you outside those geographic areas.

Here’s the data: