Recently LinkedIn reached a milestone recording 100 million users. Of these, 44 million users are from the US. The company’s blog reports that around 1 million people are signing up every week. These figures are impressive, but the number of active users is what matters for the advertisers.
The results of January 2011 Experian Hitwise survey indicate that the site received only 0.51% of all social media visits in the US. As expected, Facebook reported highest percentage of visits at 90%, but sites like Twitter, Myspace, Tagged, MyLife.com and myYearbook also came up ahead of LinkedIn.
But according to December 2010 comScore report, the site had 26.6 million unique American visitors, a number lower than Facebook and Myspace, but higher than Twitter. According to this report, the numbers of unique American visitors on other leading social networking sites were; Facebook 153.9 million, Myspace 50.1 million, Twitter 23.6 million, Tnmblr 6.7 and Formspring 5.3 million.
According to the findings of the Media Audit October 2010 survey, the percentage of US consumers logging on to the site in September was 11.5%. The percentages for other popular social media sites were; Facebook 48.2%, Myspace 13.4%, Twitter 9.6%, Digg 2.6% and StumbleUpon 2.3%. Arbitron/ Edison Research February 2010 study indicated that 8% of the US consumers above age of 12 years used LinkedIn.
August 2010 Fiserv survey indicates that LinkedIn users are more evenly spread out in terms of age. Although LinkedIn usage is low in all age brackets when compared to sites like Facebook, the generation Y members are almost as likely to use the site as boomers. But the usage in the older age group is significantly low. For an effective company internet marketing strategy, marketers need to consider all these factors and use the site based on their target market.