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UK LinkedIn Facts, Figures and Statistics

Posted by Jorgen Sundberg

A new set of UK LinkedIn statistics came out the other week, courtesy of Jacco Valkenburg and City AM. There were some interesting demographic findings here, let’s have a look under the bonnet:

Total number of users in the UK

LinkedIn are very close to five million users in the UK, the number is currently 4,712,656. 498,000 of these logged in on the 4th of January 2011.

Average age and income for UK LinkedIn users

By the look of things, you’re likely to interact with middle aged men with a university degree, making about £60,000 per year.


Average professional seniority

There are quite a few old foxes lurking about on LinkedIn, a whopping 209,336 people have worked more than 10 years at their company. Then we have new arrivals, no less than 1,963,531 have worked less than a year at their current company. Interestingly, only 80,532 have less than one year of working experience indicating that office juniors haven’t really taken to LinkedIn yet.

Most connected industries

It won’t come as a surprise that most UK users are in IT (324,770). Other well connected industries include Financial Services (188,786), Computer Software (124,785) and Marketing/Advertising (119,958).

Well connected companies

Again, the biggest employer in the UK is the NHS and it also tops LinkedIn connections with (18,140). Other big companies on LinkedIn include BT (11,536), Royal Bank of Scotland (11,221), IBM (9,217) and HSBC (8,557).

Time spent on LinkedIn

The average user is on LinkedIn for 7.3 minutes per day (compare that to Facebook’s 30 minutes per day). One interesting finding is that 1% of LinkedIn ‘Addicts’ are responsible for 24% of all page visits in the UK – you know who you are people!

Where LinkedIn is used

The share of users logging on from work/home in the UK are rather surprisingly 38% business / 62% home. I wonder how many of the 62% are job seekers and how many are actually using LinkedIn as a social tool in their free time.

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  • Steve Waldron

    Interesting statistics Jorgen.
    I wonder how many recruitment companies in the UK are still not using LinkedIn to help their business grow?

  • http://jorgensundberg.net Jorgen Sundberg

    Surely not many I would hope! If you come across any, Link Humans will have to do an emergency call out :-)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=820985480 Christian Guthier

    Very interesting. So the young ones AND the old ones are hoping to further their careers by using Linkedin.

  • http://twitter.com/mr_linkedin Mark Williams

    Interesting stats but I wonder where they came from?
    LinkedIn announced 5 million users in the UK last December so that total figure is inaccurate and therefore makes you wonder how accurate the rest is. The % business/home is surprising but again how are they working that out? Time of day perhaps but when is the cut off point between work and home – many people continue working past 7pm these days but I wouldn’t mind betting they use something like 5.30pm.
    As always we have to be a bit careful with unofficial stats, especially when the source is not revealed!

  • http://jorgensundberg.net Jorgen Sundberg

    Yes good points Mark. I read it in the paper (City A.M.) and checked back to Jacco’s site but not sure how he and his team came up with the numbers, definitely worth asking him which I’ll do right now…

  • John Horsley

    Mark, totally agree with you.

    http://www.slideshare.net/amover/linked-in-demographics-and-statistics-2011 Here Linkedin claim 6 Million user in the UK but above under 5 Million is claimed?? why would you release data with these contradictions or is this a case of lies, damn lies and statistics?

    http://linkedin.com/in/digitalmarketing

  • http://jorgensundberg.net Jorgen Sundberg

    Hi John, the stats are from Jacco Valkenburg and Amodiovalerio Verde respectively (we clearly state this in the posts).

  • John Horsley

    @ Jorgen – why are they 1 Million users apart from each other?

    “LinkedIn are very close to five million users in the UK, the number is currently 4,712,656. 498,000 of these logged in on the 4th of January 2011″.

    And here http://www.slideshare.net/amover/linked-in-demographics-and-statistics-2011 over a million users more in the UK are quoted?

    Anyway, very useful data to me all the same and thanks for posting.

  • http://jorgensundberg.net Jorgen Sundberg

    It is quite a discrepancy indeed – I believe Jacco pulled the information together for City AM through his own data. It’s a shame that LinkedIn don’t publish their official figures more often but I can understand why they don’t.

  • John Horsley

    @ Jorgen, surely this data must have come from Linkedin in the first instance?? if not where was the source? I am guessing they provided the data as they are going IPO to generate some buzz around the business and help bolster the share price when stock becomes available. What do you think? do you know the source of the data for these reports?

    I was amused and amazed to see that the NHS have so many of their staff on the platform when they don’t provide a commercial service. You would naturally expect a number of their executives on the site but would never have guessed that they had 18,140 people on the platform. What do so many of them do on Linkedin or “are they looking for work due to government cuts!”

    Thanks again for the post, I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog and will bookmark for future.

  • http://jorgensundberg.net Jorgen Sundberg

    Hi John, I think Jacco has his own methods – he is the Dutch grand master of LinkedIn afterall. Do ask him if you speak to him, he is http://nl.linkedin.com/in/jacco

    And yes didn’t expect the NHS to have that many people on LinkedIn, is this because there are too many admin people and not enough doctors/nurses perhaps?!

  • John Horsley

    @ Jorgen, yes that’s what I am thinking far to many admin and mid management (too many chiefs and not enough indians springs to mind) perhaps the cuts won’t be too damaging after all? thanks for reaching out on Linkedin and please to have got the conversation going with you.

  • http://twitter.com/recruiterblog Johnny Campbell

    Hi Jorgen
    Thanks for putting this together; I came across this post whilst researching stats for graduate use of social media.  LinkedIn in the UK currently has over 6.3 million members. I got my figures from LinkedIn by using the Advertising product.  If you create a campaign you can target by geography and age and it will suggest the total population available.  The figures suggested for various demographics hold up against the official figures occasionally quoted by LinkedIn themselves.  Interestingly, if you select each of the different age demographics the total is less than half of the total available, which suggests to me that they can only vouch for the ages of one third of their members. Comparing one age demographic against another and then against the total number of members suggests that 17% of LinkedIn users are aged 18-24, nearly double the number suggested by the stats above. I would suggest revising this article as there is much interest in this topic and LinkedIn provide the stats directly, albeit “through the back door”!  
    Keep up the good work.

    J

  • http://jorgensundberg.net Jorgen Sundberg

    Hi Johnny thanks for your comment. Yes indeed LinkedIn grows every day so perhaps it’s worth updating this on a monthly basis. The stats are from early January if I remember correctly.

    Someone did mention that the LinkedIn Ads numbers are not always reliable although they really should be as LinkedIn sell ads to their promise. The younger age group growing is very interesting – I’ve always told Gen Y to get on LinkedIn but they prefer their Facebook and Twitter for obvious reasons. 

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    Amazing write-up! This could aid plenty of people find out more about this particular issue. Are you keen to integrate video clips coupled with these? It would absolutely help out. Your conclusion was spot on and thanks to you; I probably won’t have to describe everything to my pals. I can simply direct them here!