How Ecademy.com differs from other business networks! [kwiqq]

Posted on | August 28, 2009 | 5 Comments

This is my analysis of Ecademy. Recently having seen a massive growth in my contacts on Ecademy (my profile), I decided to investigate what makes this business social network different from the others, like LinkedIn, Xing etc.

Ecademy

Unfortunately Ecademy doesn’t give the number of users or page views on their site. But it is certainly a popular site amongst freelancers and professionals working from home. Thomas Power, founder of Ecademy tells me that the site is popular amongst the mature audience i.e. 40+, who are looking to expand their business. It’s not like corporate LinkedIn or Xing.

Although we couldn’t find figures we can compare it with a popular site like Netvibes.com on Alexa. From the graphs below although the reach of Ecademy is not as much as Netvibes the page views are comparable (perhaps better?):

Ecademy culture

I’m of the opinion that the culture of an organisation or a social network is set by its founders. Couple of days back on properly using Ecademy I found that:

• Users are more receptive on Ecademy than LinkedIn, Facebook (and perhaps even Twitter). They also respond much quicker.
• Good percentage of Ecademy users are looking for new opportunities or joint ventures.
• There are some users though who have resources to look beyond freebies and have fantastic product or service.
• Ecademy is a strong marketplace to promote opportunities.
• Most users who connected with me were looking to form a long term relationship.
• Ecademy has a fantastic reach, apart from UK there were messages from US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and India.
• Some messages on Ecademy were spammy (and I ignored them like everyone else does).

All the above show that the culture of Ecademy is set to be more open and widespread. The emails I received on Ecademy were more like ‘how are you, your family and business’ covering the over all perspective of a user as oppose to just the business outlook.

I felt Ecademy was connecting businesses at a personal level as oppose to their area of specialism. What was your experience?

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