LinkedIn on Thursday announced the availability of the professional networking platform in Hindi – the first Indian regional language on LinkedIn, to support over 600 million Hindi speakers worldwide. With 82 million members, India is the second largest market for LinkedIn.
Starting today, as part of the Phase 1 roll-out of LinkedIn in Hindi, members will be able to access their feed, profile, jobs, messaging, and create content in Hindi on desktop, and on their Android and iOS phones, the company said in a statement.
It added that as the next step, LinkedIn will work towards widening the range of job opportunities available for Hindi speaking professionals across industries, including more banking, and government jobs. The platform will also continue to add more Hindi publishers and creators in the coming weeks to boost member engagement and conversations in Hindi.
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“With the launch of Hindi, now more members and customers can unlock greater value from the platform through content, jobs, and networking, and express themselves in a language that they feel comfortable in…We have witnessed high engagement and member growth in the last year, and it is at this exciting inflection point that we are strengthening our vision to create economic opportunity for ‘every’ member of the workforce, and taking down language barriers for Hindi speakers across the world,” Ashutosh Gupta, India Country Manager, LinkedIn said.
With the launch of Hindi, LinkedIn now supports 25 languages globally, he added.India is a core market for growth at LinkedIn and the second largest market in terms of members after the US, accounting for 82 million members as part of a global community of 800 million members. India’s member base has grown by 20+ million in the past three years (15% year-over-year growth) and it has witnessed a spike in engagement and conversations on the platform since the pandemic, the company said.
Smartphone users will need to select Hindi as their preferred device language under phone settings to view the LinkedIn mobile application in Hindi. For members who are already using Hindi as their preferred language on their smartphones, the LinkedIn experience will automatically be available in Hindi. On desktop, members will need to click on the ‘Me’ icon at the top of their LinkedIn homepage and select ‘Settings and Privacy’. Members then need to click on ‘Account Preferences’ on the left, select ‘Site Preferences’, click ‘Change’ next to ‘Language’, and select ‘Hindi’ from the drop down list.
Once selected, the user interface and platform experience, including the navigation bar, will be displayed in Hindi.
User-generated content, such as posts on a member’s home feed, will be displayed in the language that they were originally created in. However, for members whose primary language selection is set to Hindi, clicking on ‘See Translation’ option will display Hindi translations of the respective posts. If members are not already using a Hindi keyboard, to create Hindi content on LinkedIn, they will need to switch their keyboard input language to Hindi, or add the Hindi keyboard on their desktop or smartphone, LinkedIn said.
Further, to display their existing profile in Hindi, members will need to create a secondary language profile in the same language as their existing profile. This will prompt them to choose a preferred language for their existing profile from a drop down list of 25 languages, which now includes Hindi.
57% users prefer vernacular language: apna.co
Separately, apna.co, another professional networking platform, on Thursday said more than 57% of its users prefer a vernacular language to search for opportunities and build their professional networks. Launched in 2019, apna’s app is presently available in 10 languages apart from English, including Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu.“The vernacular language interface is driving a higher engagement on the platform. The data collected over the last year also reveals that after English, Hindi is the most popular language followed by Kannada and Tamil,” it said in a statement.
The company added that users in Tier-II cities are more likely to choose a vernacular language to enable their job search and professional networking. Cities including Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ahmedabad, Jabalpur, Bhilai have the highest percentage of regional language users on apna.co.
“The comfort and familiarity of interacting in their first language builds confidence and enables our users to find hyperlocal opportunities with ease. We are certain that the trend of using vernacular languages will strengthen as we expand to more cities in India,” Manas Singh, Chief Business Officer, apna.co said.
In the last 12 months, apna.co has enabled more than 7.2 crore interviews and 6 crore+ professional conversations in a regional language, it added.
