Shares of professional networking site LinkedIn jumped 11 percent in early morning trading, as the company reported that revenue doubled in the fourth quarter of 2011 from $81.7 million in the year-ago quarter to $167.7 million. Profits rose 30 percent from $5.3 million to $6.9 million year over year.
During its earnings call, the company spent a good deal of time talking about the importance of mobile to its business. Mobile page views continue to be LinkedIn's fastest growing service, increasing in excess of 350 percent year-on-year.
"Mobile now represents 16 percent of member page views and 15 percent of member visits, and this growth has accelerated through January," said Steve Sordello, LinkedIn's CFO, according to transcript of the company's earnings call provided compliments of Seeking Alpha.
In August of 2011, LinkedIn completely revamped its mobile experience, launching new apps for iOS and Android, as well as a new mobile website.
LinkedIn said it would begin to monetize its mobile business with mobile ads in the near future.
"With the success we have thus far to-date we're going to start to run some tests with regard to advertising some of our marketing solutions within the mobile environment," said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's CEO.
Weiner stressed that mobile has supplemented its online properties and the company is not currently seeing cannibalization of web engagement.
"One of the nice parts of our mobile success thus far is the increase in connection density we're seeing," Weiner said. "We've noticed that people who use LinkedIn mobile applications are actually increasing the number of connections that they have on the network and that increased connection density drives greater engagement because you get a better experience, more content, greater liquidity."
Shares of LinkedIn were up nearly 12 percent as of this writing and trading at $85.42.