(Photo credit: Saad Faruque)
Stop scolding teenagers about spending too much time on social networks. If you've got a precocious 14-year-old, she or he soon might be signing onto LinkedIn, building up a young striver's profile and doing some research about college choices.
Think of this as a tug-of-war for teens' attention. Fun-seeking adolescents will stick with Facebook's gossip friendly format. Meanwhile, their most ambitious classmates will be drawn to LinkedIn's newest treat: bar charts full of information about the career paths of alumni from hundreds of brand-name colleges.
As of Sept. 12, the age-18 minimum for LinkedIn membership will disappear. Being 14 will be sufficient in the U.S., Canada, Spain and Germany, while 13 will be enough in many other countries. In fact, as my Forbes colleague Susan Adams noted in May, at least a few go-getters in the under-18 crowd have already created LinkedIn profiles anyway.
Don't expect Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to tremble at this development. Teens may have deeply ambivalent feelings about Facebook, but they can't stay away, as a Pew Foundation study documented earlier this year. If the ensuing battle for teens' attention is measured by time spent on sites, Facebook is guaranteed to super-poke LinkedIn into oblivion.
But there's something intriguing about LinkedIn's decision to go after the college-bound market anyway. Estimates are that students and their families already spend as much as $1 billion a year on college test-prep services. Colleges' own marketing budgets to reach high schoolers are doubtless much larger. If LinkedIn has bigger plans in this sector -- which it almost certainly does -- it won't be hard to find ways to make money.
LinkedIn's new initiative centers on specially designed pages for universities. Late last week, LinkedIn's higher education evangelist, John Hill, offered previews of new LinkedIn pages for Carnegie-Mellon and New York University. In addition to all the usual fare -- such as campus news, photos and financial-aid facts -- LinkedIn will provide lots of unique data about alumni career paths, as well some help in reaching out to individual graduates.
For example, LinkedIn knows that lots of NYU graduates go on to work at Citicorp, while Carnegie-Mellon alums are more likely to end up at Google. Probe deeper, and you can see how many alumni list risk arbitrage as a skill or can program in Hadoop. Prospective students can poke around until they find pathways that seem personally appealing. "It becomes aspirational," Hill says. "You can follow the life paths of successful alumni."
LinkedIn doesn't yet provide admissions-office statistics such as average SAT scores, grades or odds of getting in for specific schools. That's the realm of free sites such as CollegeData.com, About.com and Parchment.com, as well as subscription sites such as PrincetonReview.com or Naviance. But LinkedIn could partner with an existing data provider, build up its own expertise, or make an acquisition.
Without directly addressing any specific possibility, a Linked in spokeswoman says: "We're definitely looking into a number of different options."
LinkedIn's current member-profile format emphasizes people's work history, which seems stunningly ill-suited for young newcomers whose main income streams are likely to involve gifts from grandma or an occasional turn at a lemonade stand. But LinkedIn says it will steer teens toward different ways of filling out their membership profiles, emphasizing academic honors, projects, school awards and the like.
LinkedIn also is tightening up privacy settings for teens' profiles, recognizing that they -- or their parents -- don't want all the random attention that can come from joining a social network. The Wall Street Journal's Brian Fitzgerald provides details here. Teens' default settings will mask these new members' last names and hometowns, prevent search engines such as Google from listing their profiles, and spare younger members the very mixed blessings of getting InMail messages from recruiters and the like.
Will teens become valued members of the LinkedIn community? It's anyone's guess at this point. LinkedIn officials are hoping that teens can get started by connecting to older relatives' networks, gradually expanding their associations to include relevant college alumni. But that assumes that teens won't annoy existing members with ill-advised connection requests, or stir up trouble by creating spoof profiles.
In any case, LinkedIn is aiming big. It starts this month with fully built-out pages for 200 leading universities and colleges around the world. "Our ultimate goal is 23,000 universities," Hill says.
