LinkedIn has launched a light version of its app, which is less than 1MB in size, in an effort to increase its engagement in smaller towns. The business- and employment-oriented social networking site also plans to extend its searches to blue collar jobs.

Talking to BusinessLine , Akshay Kothari, Country Manager, LinkedIn India, said the firm is eyeing the 80-odd million knowledge professionals in the country to use the app for finding jobs or getting skilled.

“We found out that the majority of the users — in cities and to a large extent smaller towns — refrained from installing the app on their phones due to its size and the limited storage space they have on their phones,” he said, adding that patchy internet connections in larger towns were also a factor to come up with an app that can work well with 2G connections.

Called ‘LinkedIn Lite’, the app is available for Android users on the Play Store. Further, the app follows the launch of a mobile website in September last year, designed specifically for India users. Instead of paring down some features on its regular app, LinkedIn decided to start development of its ‘lite’ app from scratch. “It took three months and a dozen engineers to come up with this version,” said Kothari.

The result was an app with a size less than 1MB (700 kilobytes) and a 80 per cent improvement in speed, in terms of accessing LinkedIn. It had to make some tweaks such as using a system font instead of the LinkedIn font, a move which resulted in the website loading faster.

Another reason for the launch of the app has to do with data consumption on mobilephones in tier II and III cities, which typically use smaller data packs.

LinkedIn plans to roll out the mobile web version and the Android app in another 60 countries shortly following this launch.

Like the regular version, LinkedIn lite also offers all key features, such as news feed, jobs, profile, network, messaging, notifications and search.

The company is making these efforts to grow its user base and increase engagement in one of its largest markets. Currently, it has 42 million users in India, which in its category is a 50 per cent market share. “In the last 12 months, we have grown our user base by 10 million,” said Kothari.

Analysts believe this move is aimed at user stickiness. “The ultimate objective is to increase user stickiness,” said Anshoo Nandwaani, co-founder, Greyhound Research.

Through the lite app, LinkedIn has also an eye on tapping into the blue collar jobs. “At any point in time in India, there are lakhs of jobs available; but often a textile company does not know the availability of labour,” said Kothari. LinkedIn is working on offering a solution which will connect availability of labour and industry in a better manner.

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