5 things to know: BranchOut, the Facebook career networking app

5 things to know: BranchOut, the Facebook career networking app

LinkedIn’s biggest competitor just hit 25 million users; nabs $25 million in additional funding

BY JEFFREY BAUSCH

There’s no beating around the bush with this one — BranchOut is fast becoming one of LinkedIn’s biggest competitors. Why? Because after two years, it has 25 million users and yesterday captured $25 million in Series Cround funding from Mayfield and other investors, bringing the program’s total venture-capital backing to a whopping $49 million.

Lest we forget, the easy-to-use app also has the awesome reach of Facebook’s 850-million-person rolodex in its back pocket. “LinkedIn is a great company, and does a great job with 10% of the workforce,” CEO Rick Marini told Business Insider , eluding to executives making top pay who use the site. “But the other 90% of the world is on Facebook. Those are the people we can finally give a professional profile to.”

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably already gotten a dozen or so invites to join BranchOut. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably hit the “Ignore” button on all of them. But with this many people joining the network, the obvious question becomes not so much “Why?” but rather, “Should you?”

To help you decide, here’s a brief overview of everything you need to know about what the program has to offer:

You can see which of your friends (or friends of friends) work at what companies.

Since BranchOut is Facebook-based, it uses the site’s pre-existing social graph to automatically connect those who sign up to their friends and family. This is in stark contrast to LinkedIn, which requires users to build their professional network one person at a time.

You can fill in your history.

This is actually quite similar to what LinkedIn offers. Users fill in their work histories as they see fit; they can also send messages to their connections, collect recommendations, and request BranchOut introductions to friends of friends.

There are (tons of) job listings.

Currently, BranchOut has about 3 million job listings on the site. It also has a product called “RecruiterConnect” that works along the same lines as the LinkedIn Recruiter; that is, they both help employers source talent.

In fact, these two products are so similar in service that LinkedIn actually cited RecruiterConnect as a direct violation in terms of service when it blocked BranchOut from accessing its API last year.

It’s popular. Really, really popular.

On average, BranchOut has 13 million unique visitors every month. According to web resources, this makes it one of the most popular apps on Facebook — more popular than Pinterest, Twitter . . . even Instagram.

To give you a clearer understanding of just how quickly this app is growing among the mobile community, BranchOut launched its mobile app in November 2011. By January 2012, mobile accounted for 25% of the service’s traffic. Today, it accounts for 45% of all visits.

It’s a great global resource.

One of the reasons why BranchOut is so popular is that it’s seen huge adoption among two key communities: the aforementioned mobile users, and the international community. Of the latter group, half of BranchOut’s new members are outside the U.S. This is due largely to the app’s integration with European job sites totaljobs.com and StepStone. Partnerships with these sites, as well as CareerBuilder here in the U.S., allows the BranchOut job searchee to survey their connections (and connections of connections) on a worldwide scale, and determine if anyone might be able to help them land a job.

Having such a wide-ranging, global reach is incredibly useful in today’s job market, especially as telecommute positions become more popular with modern-day companies.

Conclusion

This article isn’t meant to suggest that BranchOut is nipping at the heels of LinkedIn. 25 million users is impressive, but it’s nowhere close to LinkedIn’s 150 million subscribers. What this article is suggesting, however, is that, really, it’s a matter of time before this is the case.

So, the recommendation is this: Next time you receive a BranchOut invite, you might want to accept. It’s a great opportunity to expand your network of contacts, and could introduce you to many new career opportunities. ■

Via: Business Insider; Mashable