A lot of information has been released in the last few weeks on LinkedIn’s continued impressive climb over the last 10 years or so.
The financials
BusinessOf Apps updates its data regularly and this gives us two very clear growth charts for LinkedIn: Revenue – up from US$81.4m in 2010Q4 to US$3530m in 2021Q4; Users – up from 90m in 2010Q4 to 810m in 2021Q4. That’s impressive growth, and there’s no hint of a slowdown in sight. (The anomaly seen in Revenue in 2016 relates to the Microsoft take-over time period.) Parent company, Microsoft released its financials for 2022Q2 in January, which provides supporting information, i.e.: 36% Y-o-Y growth in 2022 Q2.
The users
Total members (users) is up from 430m when Microsoft bought LinkedIn for US$26.2 billion in 2016, 13 years after launch in 2003. (Please note, these are not active users.) The users on this social media (SM) platform are predominantly from the USA (178m), followed by India (76m), China (53m) and Brazil (49m). LinkedIn provides a graphic breakdown of members in selected countries, with South Africa at 9m – ahead of both Egypt (6m) and Nigeria (5m), and the leader in terms of LinkedIn users in Africa.
This equates to an advertising reach of 10.2% against total world population – up 11.1% Y-o-Y. Ad reach for internet users is 16.3% and 14.6% for total population aged 18+. There are wide variations between countries, e.g. 69.1% for the USA, 5.6% for Pakistan and 23.7% for South Africa.
In terms of age groups, there are smaller cohorts in the 18-24 age group (20.4%), 25-34 age group (59.1%), 35-54 age group (17.7%) and 55+ age group (2.9%), while the biggest cohort is the 25-34 year-olds (59.1%).
The job-related stuff
The number of schools (elsewhere in the world this means colleges and universities), grew from 60k in 2018 to 90k in 2019, 100k in 2020 and 120k in 2021. Also worth noting is the current number of:
- Companies listed: 57m
- Skills listed: 38k
- Events: 24k per week.
- RSVPs per week: 1.5m
- People searching for a job each week: 49m
- Job applications sent each month: 100+m
- Job applications submitted per second: 77
- Jobs posted in October 2020 alone: 14m
- People hired every minute: 6. (The Q2 FY2022 showed an increase in confirmed hires of 110% Y-o-Y)
Perhaps the job losses worldwide due to the pandemic have driven the increasing number of unemployed people around the world on to LinkedIn in search of a new position. And perhaps this data suggests to the job seekers out there that there is a better and more strategic way to search for a new position than spamming lists of companies with a CV that they will probably never look at. Perhaps building a LinkedIn profile and applying for a few targeted jobs from the millions posted on LinkedIn each year would show a better result.
Juliet Gillies is a highly skilled writer, editor and English specialist. She is a skilled, experienced writer, having started in the marketing/communication field, but now focuses on educational materials. She has been writing and editing at a professional level for more than 30+ years.
(Sources: All data was extracted from the annual data reported by Hootsuite / WeAreSocial /DataReportal (//wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2022/01/digital-2022-another-year-of-bumper-growth-2/) and the regular report on LinkedIn provided by BusinessOfApps (//www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-statistics/). Additional information was obtained from LinkedIn (//news.linkedin.com/about-us#Statistics); Microsoft (//view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=//c.s-microsoft.com/en-us/CMSFiles/SlidesFY22Q2.pptx?version=4a9117e1-04ff-5143-12a0-1ecfc041aa59); SocialMediaToday (//www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedin-continues-to-see-record-levels-of-engagement-sales-solutions-re/617738/).)
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