Skip to content

Everything you wanted to know about LinkedIn – statistics and trends 2010

On request and by popular demand, I’ve compiled a list of facts and figures about the most professional networking site; LinkedIn. Did you know that the LinkedIn.com site was launched exactly 7 years ago, on 5 May 2003, and has 66,266,528 members at this moment?

LinkedIn corporation has currently 500 employees with its headquarters based in Mountain View, California and the European office centered in London, England. Their Customer Service center is based in Omaha, Nebraska. They also have smaller (sales) offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Sydney, Mumbai and Amsterdam. The sales offices outside the USA are located in countries where there is relative high penetration or large population of users:

  • Australia 1,235,574 members
  • Canada 2,337,350
  • India 5,380,162
  • Netherlands 1,811,174
  • United Kingdom 3,855,936
  • United States 32,987,660

On average 36.5M people visit LinkedIn.com every month. In March 2010 they had the most visitors in one week until today: 15.1 Million. See also the following directly measured weekly stats:

Everything you wanted to know about LinkedIn – statistics and trends 2010

Employer Branding – Who Is Your Company’s Professional Friend-Maker?

If your organization is planning a Social Media recruiting initiative, you may have started thinking about what tools to use.  But you should really begin with the goal.  What do you expect to gain from using Social Media, be it for marketing, PR, or Recruiting?  Who is the target audience that you want to attract?  Where does that target audience hang out online?  You may not need a Facebook presence, or a Linkedin Group, or a Twitter page to network with that audience.

What you will need is a professional friend-maker to help build your employer brand.  Sure, you can put up profiles in all the hot SM spots and post some topical info or discussions there.  But who is going to be the person (or people) who actually reaches out to your new community members and have conversations?  Having multiple anonymous people behind a company brand who help keep the communities going is so impersonal.  Having a real person to identify and bond with is better.

The person you choose may be from recruiting or HR if this is a Social Recruiting initiative.Employer Branding – Who Is Your Company’s Professional Friend-Maker?

YouTube campaign: Search for the World’s Greatest Salesperson

A great social recruiting campaign was launched on 28 March by Ogilvy on their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/ogilvy. They are looking for the Worlds Greatest Salesperson. The task is to make a video, selling a red brick and if they think you’re the best you can win a trip to Cannes, a three-month paid fellowship — and immortality. Funny and very professional executed as it comes with 6 supporting videos (see below), a media pack (music, photos and badges) and a six page briefing document. Perhaps a bit over the top is the 8400 words (13 pages!), also in 5 different languages, that are used to explain the official rules.

YouTube campaign: Search for the World’s Greatest Salesperson

Cultural challenges with LinkedIn

LinkedIn, more than any other business networking site has a truly global reach. There are now over 60 million users throughout the world and this is growing by a staggering 2 million every month (LinkedIn claim that a new user signs up every second).

LinkedIn can be used for many different purposes (finding a job, finding new employees, market research and business development to name a few) but it is essentially a networking tool. Mastering visibility through effective networking techniques is key to success with LinkedIn (whatever your objectives) but there are increasing challenges presented by the international and multicultural nature of this network.

I was reminded of this fact recently over a coffee with Jacco Valkenburg when we met in London. Jacco asked me how a Recruiter in the UK would react if they saw that a potential target candidate hadn’t ticked the ‘career opportunities’ box in their ‘interested in’ section (at the bottom of their profile).

My answer was very clear – they would ignore it and approach the candidate anyway! Jacco was clearly surprised and stated that in the Netherlands this was considered to be poor practice and that if a user had not ticked this then they should be left alone. My argument was that this tick box is only ever noticed when someone first opens their account and that could have been years ago so how do we know it is still accurate?

Cultural challenges with LinkedIn

Just say no to social media!

Something to think about, is Social Media a new addiction? Are you a social media addict?

According to research from Retrovo almost half of the respondents said they check in on the social media scene in bed, during the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. Between 15% and 23% of of social media users saying this is how they get their morning “news”. What about the fact that 56% of social media users need to check FaceBook at least once a day? According to this study it appears that social media may have begun to replace more conventional sources for news with many social media users. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Just say no to social media!