Company News · May 27, 2010

Are you LinkedIn?

By Tom Webster

If you are, you aren’t alone. Millions of Americans currently maintain profile pages on LinkedIn, and the business-focused social networking site has seen its user base (at least in the U.S.) grow by 300% since 2008. We’ve been tracking LinkedIn for several years in the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia research series, and we’ve seen LinkedIn continue to be the “little engine that could” in comparison to Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, despite the fact that awareness of LinkedIn is significantly lower than awareness of Twitter (as reported in our recent Twitter Usage In America report), usage is certainly comparable: 8% of Americans have a profile page on LinkedIn, while 7% report being Tweeters.

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Much has been made recently of LinkedIn’s improved Twitter integration, which adds depth to the former service’s social offering and essentially makes LinkedIn a rich, business-centric Twitter client. Obviously this is a positive for LinkedIn, but what much of the reporting around these developments has overlooked is that it is potentially good for Twitter, as well. In fact, our data suggests that the majority of LinkedIn users do not use Twitter, so introducing “Tweets” into the ambient awareness of LinkedIn’s user base may in fact provide those users with subtle reinforcement of the potential benefits (business-related and otherwise) of sharing status updates with their extended network.

By the way, are we LinkedIn? Let’s connect!

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