Crossing or Xing?

Xing profile

Xing is a German based business network that began in 2004. The network is structured for business and job purpose. The registration is free but practically all features can be used if a premium member is activated. All thou it is a business platform you don’t receive a receipt of payment.

 

Xing has 7 million registrations, Around 4 million are active users, others are considered sleepy due to its very passive activity. Xing has bought Neurona a Spanish business network in 2008. Hereby it has broken its German frontiers to enter a European playground of social networks. Numbers shows that 30% of its users are German ( or German speakers) another 15 to 20 % are Spanish users, the rest of the users are mostly European with the UK and Italy in front. To compare it with Linkedin, Linkedin has arrived to (March 2009) to 35 million users on which 60 % of the users in the American continent and growing number in India.

The other competitors of Xing is French based Viadeo.

On the free version you can customize your profile and add your known contacts to your profile. You can search for a job and you can be contacted by premium members.

If you register for the first time, you will have 6 months free premium memberships which provides you by far more features. The premium membership allows you to view and contact (indefinitely) any profile in the network. On Linkedin Premium it allows you to  view profiles inside the whole network but the contacts are numbered by 5 a month.  The premium membership provides its members to search and contact any profile, create and organize groups inside Xing, search and candidate to jobs or add jobs for a small fee.

The strength of Xing is its Multilanguage platform (16 languages including Chinese).

 

I have used Xing for talentscouting purposes and found it a very interesting application, also because you could use this application directly with your mobile, both downloading contacts as uploading. Linkedin premium costs 3 times more per month than Xing and it does allow you to sent only 5 mails per month, you can cumulate but what are 5 mails if you need to contact hundreds of people a month !? Xing allows you to contact indefinitely. Linkedin wins only by the numbers of registration. Xing has also another disadvantage, it has a lack on workspace application, which Linkedin has provided with a series of application, such as Box.net, Huddle, WordPress, Slideshare, etc.

This gives the profile the opportunity to use this platform as a workspace and stimulates crowdsourcing.

 

The future plans of Xing are new local marketing campaigns in order to promote this interesting business tool.