XING combines two key elements of your working life – the skills and experience listed in your profile as well as the contacts and acquaintances within your business network. There are several ways to link the two, such as by recommending someone in your network for a job vacancy or by giving them a reference.

Today’s update provides XING Beta Labs users with another great way of leveraging their network. The new endorsing feature allows people who visit your profile to endorse your entries in the “Haves” section of your profile. By activating this new feature, anyone who visits your profile can endorse your “Haves”. Endorsers don’t have to be direct contacts, nor do they need to have activated the feature themselves. (more…)

About a week ago we launched some new Company Profile features. So far more than 90,000 users – ranging from freelancers to SMEs to large concerns such as Siemens and Daimler –have already claimed their XING Company Profile. While talking to customers to find out their needs we noticed that there’s often a simple solution to their questions and requests, so we decided to write a summary with main five tips.

Tip 1: Search engine optimization
Make sure your profile can be found by search engines as you may well be reaching the right people on XING, but when it comes to range the more the better. So if your Company Profile can’t be found by searching on Google, Bing or Yahoo, you’re completely invisible beyond the realms of XING. We recommend you change this in your settings by going to your Company Profile, then clicking on “Company Profile settings” on the right-hand side and ticking the box next to “This Company Profile is visible to search engines and non-XING members.”

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Mirja Bester, Product Manager

Companies need figures for the communication channels they use so they can evaluate, manage and optimize their effectiveness. They need to find out how many people have visited their XING Company Profile and how they found out about it. They also want to know which search terms people use to find their profile and which industry visitors come from. Now we have an answer to all of these points by providing you with key figures so that you can measure the success of your social media activity on XING.

Editors of PLUS Company Profiles now have access to a wide range of visitor and follower statistics such as comparisons of different time periods to check the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, a feature common to other analysis tools. We can also show you how visitors came to visit your profile so you can optimize it and make it even easier for people to find it using certain search terms.

How your PLUS Company Profile statistics could look.

As well as the popular “Visitors to your profile” feature, editors can now also see who’s interested in their company. Businesses with a PLUS Company Profile are also highlighted in search results and are easier to find because they can define up to ten keywords. And to round things off, PLUS Company Profiles can have up to ten editors, meaning that people from various key departments can keep their finger on the pulse. (more…)

Lydia Dreyer, Product Manager

As a social network for business contacts we offer a number of different ways for people to connect and interact with one another, the most direct method being a contact request. When you connect with someone you can view their profile, posts and links along with their contacts who you can then reach out to and expand your own network…

Sending contact requests isn’t always the best way to meet people as some members choose to only connect with people they’ve met in person. XING of course has a solution for this as users can select which of their profile details can be viewed by each individual member. On top of that, users can add notes and even bookmark contacts. We’ve now taken this a step further as today’s release includes the option to follow people on XING you find interesting without having to actually connect with them. (more…)

David Montiel, Senior Java/Android Developer

As you already know, XING has an Android app available in the Google Play Store that we continuously upgrade by adding very useful features for your networking needs. So here‘s a list of some of those features that will show you how to get the most out of XING using the Android app.

Share on XING

Wherever you see the “share” option in Android OS you’ll find the option to share on XING. So in the Twitter app, for example, you’ll see all the apps that allow you to share text after pressing the share button. Then just look for XING in this list and share your information with your XING network.

Share on Twitter

The XING Android app allows you to share anything you want in the Twitter network feed as well. Simply check the “Post on Twitter” box before you post your update and once it has been shared on XING, you’ll be taken to your favorite Twitter Android client with the text already there so all you need to do is press the send button to share your XING status on Twitter.

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Marc Ehrich, Product Manager Mobile

Version 4.0 of our iPhone app was developed to make things better, more logical, and more intuitive. You probably won’t see a lot of the details at first glance, but the more time you spend using the app, the more you’ll notice an overall improvement in visual consistency (checkered background, transparency) and usability.

If you tap on the gray box with two arrows that appears in the top left-hand corner of every section, you’ll be presented with the main menu. Here we’ve tidied things up a bit, so upcoming birthdays and contact requests now appear in the contacts section while visitors to your profile can now be found as an item in your profile. This helps to streamline the main menu while also bundling items that make sense from a contextual perspective. (more…)

Marc Ehrich, Mobile Product Manager

You’ve probably already come across our Mobile Handshake, a feature available in all of our apps that offers a quick and easy way of adding contacts at trade fairs, conferences, etc. All you need to do is select the handshake symbol from the menu and then add the desired XING members nearby without having to type in their name and search for them. A few weeks ago we introduced XING Beam to the Android app, a feature which uses NFC technology to add contacts, and now we’ve also added QR codes to give you even more easy ways to expand your network. (more…)

Update: All available spots for the conversation view are taken for now. Of course we’re working hard to increase the future availability of this feature.

XING Beta Labs was launched in December 2011. Since then, we’ve been working at full speed to develop features like polls so we can roll them out to our members as soon as possible. Now we want to take things a step further by making it even easier for you to find out which features we’re currently working on, i.e. what we’re likely to ship to the platform in the future.

So what does this change involve? If you go to the sidebar on the left of your screen, you’ll now see a conical flask icon that you can click on to go to the XING Beta Labs. As this is a laboratory, everything listed here is currently being experimented on so you may see projects disappear or change considerably during the development process. (more…)

Yesterday evening we published our provisional figures for the 2011 financial year (press release), and I’m really happy to announce that it was an excellent year with revenue growth across the board, e-Recruiting hitting the ten million euro mark, and new records for both revenues and operative results.

The Company’s overall revenues for the 2011 financial year increased by 22 percent to €66.2 million. We also achieved record operating results (EBITDA) of €22.2 million, which is 33 percent higher than 2010 and equates to an operating margin of 34 percent.

These excellent results can be attributed to every part of the platform. Revenues in e-Recruiting grew by 65 percent to €11.7 million while Advertising turned over €7.1 million, an increase of 35 percent. Our Events segment, whose revenues are generated by our subsidiary amiando, appears in the financial statements for the first time in the Company’s history and achieved revenues of €2.5 million. Our core business also made good progress with Premium membership revenues rising by seven percent to €45.6 million (2010: €42.4 million). We also want our shareholders to benefit from these excellent results, which is why we’ll be suggesting a shareholder dividend of around €0.56 per share at the next AGM. (more…)

Update: Due to unforeseen technical issues, the feature is not yet available on our platform. We apologize for the delay.

Today’s update sees the introduction of a new XING Beta Labs feature – correspondence. But what exactly is this? Put simply, the correspondence feature summarizes your personal messages so that you can see your entire written correspondence with one or more people on a certain subject. This is similar to the thread features you may have already come across on your smartphone or email program.

Individual messages are listed below one another in a compact view that just shows the first few lines of each message. To view a certain message in full, all you need to do is click anywhere in the compact message view which will then expand to display the entire message. To the right of each message you can see which XING members are involved in the correspondence.

This is a XING Beta Labs feature. If you’d like to give it a try, you first need to activate the Beta Labs feature and then click on the conical flask icon at the bottom of the sidebar.

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