Branchout has been talked about for the last 6 months as a potential competitor to Linkedin but today I started seeing the connection requests rolling in and all the usual suspects jumping on board very much in the same way Quora has been exploding in the last week. Branchout is essentially a professional network very similar to Linkedin that is built as an app that sits on top of Facebook and it’s 600 million users. From what I can see it is incredibly viral in nature and it aims to tap in to your friends network to provide job opportunities and candidates for people looking to hire via Facebook.
Branchout has some very serious backing and advisors and it’s an idea that I have to say makes a lot of sense. Facebook has always been about personal networking and social interactions but with most people using it for all facets of life Branchout could touch the one area where Facebook has been weak to date…Enterprise.
One Click Linkedin Import
Will be interesting to see how long this stays up given how much of a competitor BranchOut could be to Linkedin but at the moment all you have to do to set up your profile is click one button and it imports all your Linkedin profile and formats it perfectly in to one simple CV. Nobody has any interest in filling out new social network profiles or duplicating work they have already done online these days so this is a crucial feature.
Incredibly Viral
This is going to get very big very fast due to the way it taps in to your Facebook social graph. It’s a simple 4 step process to set up your account and it asks you to invite all your friends in a very social way. You also grant the app the ability to send you emails, receive updates and push info to your wall so this is going to spread like absolute wildfire in the same sort of way that social games do on Facebook.
Video Explanation
It’s a fairly simple concept and should rely on Facebook’s huge existing network to really grow aggressively. The real beauty of the whole process is that you don’t have to fill in any forms or start any new accounts which is a joy in this day and age. Nobody wants a new social network to have to engage on as we already have enough of those.
Will This Be Huge?
It has the potential to be yes. It’s going to grow very very fast. It has the same viral hooks built in that a lot of the social games have on Facebook and it’s going to spread like wildfire. The big barrier it has to get over is that people don’t always think of job hunting or recruiting when thinking about Facebook but this could be a game changer. Our personal social networks are massively powerful and this looks to harness that network to find professional opportunities. It’s got an all star team and some serious backers and the biggest advantage it has is that the barriers to entry are tiny and that you can have a profile and connections in seconds. The biggest problem they have is if Linkedin decide to shut that CV importer down and If I was Linkedin I’d be thinking about doing that in a hurry because this is a major threat.
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