Review: Xing.com
You all probably have heard about Xing.com. It is the main competitor to LinkedIn and now has about 3 million users and it recently has been renamed Xing due to Chinese involvements (investment?).
Its’ portal lets you write your profile in a user-friendly way and helps you to find other profiles quite swiftly and accurately. The sad thing is that you have to upgrade to a paid account in order to see unlimited profiles in your network, instead of just the people who are directly connected to you. Unlike LinkedIn it is not so much recruiter-oriented. Xing.com seems to attract mainly small-business users and independent advisors. It also lets you state your business objective. Each keyword is indexed and thus searchable. Therefore its’ business use is more extensive and more usable than LinkedIn although the amount of users is a lot less than on the LinkedIn portal.
Another thing I very much like with the Xing.com community is that they arrange evenings where people can meet each other and network although lately that seems to have stopped... It has local (area) structures and meeting meetings. The people running who are running it are very enthusiastic and friendly. I have been to a number of such meetings. There are no entrance fees, the drinks are free and the people are just having a good time.
Also, online there is no competition as to ‘who has the largest network’, like on LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter. Even if you have no contacts at all, you can still see all the other members (provided that you have upgraded to a $ 6 dollar per month account). It has no direct IM integration, but you can name your Skype address. A button will connect you directly to another networker using Skype (download is necessary). Also, in order to be effective people will have to learn about assessing communication-styles, professional profiling and same interest group targeting if they want to be successful in their online business.
Summary
So, in my opinion it is a lot more ‘friendly’ and ‘usable’ as LinkedIn. They just don’t have the amount of people LinkedIn does. Also people on Xing.com are more connected to small businesses.
If you want personal advise regarding your online strategy, just call me, I am a Bitwine advisor
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1 comments:
I actually prefer Xing over Linkedin. If there is one problem Xing has is recruiters have become the new "pests". I made the mistake of agreeing to have a recruiter in my network once and the recruiter systematically went through almost all my contacts and pestered them as well. In my case I am there for business contacts. It is important to mark that you aren't looking for job opportunities on your profile (unless you want that which is perfectly OK) or else the recruiters will come, even if you mark it, they still come. LOL
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