Today, LinkedIn reached a major milestone: 100 million professionals worldwide.
We’re now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second.
So, what does all this growth really mean? We’re making great progress toward our ultimate goal: to connect all of the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.
This isn’t just a big milestone for us — it’s also an important one for all of you, our members, who’ve helped build the LinkedIn network. We’re most inspired that by connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale, we’re changing people’s lives in meaningful and sustainable ways. Each of our 100 million members has a unique story — from finding a job, to recruiting talent, to sourcing new deals, and even starting a business.
For example, take Dutch tech consultant Henk Van Ess, who, after frustration with his 3G iPhone’s battery life, used LinkedIn Groups to find partners and start a global business selling iPhone batteries. There’s also, Barbara Lemaire who found key benefactors for her non-profit organization on LinkedIn, helping homeless women and children rebuild their lives. Then, there are the personal stories, like Alice Shapiro, who after losing her job and home, used a LinkedIn connection to help her become a published author.
We’re also rapidly growing our network globally — our site is currently used in over 200 countries and territories around the world, with more than half of our users coming from outside of the U.S. You can now connect just as readily with someone in Sao Paulo or Singapore as you can with your colleagues in San Francisco, London or New York. You no longer have to live in the same city — or even the same country — to build and strengthen relationships that can help you succeed and grow professionally and fundamentally transform the trajectory of your career path.
We want to thank all of you, our 100 million members, for making this happen. Your experiences, connections, and shared knowledge are what make LinkedIn so powerful to each and every one of us.
Best of all, we’re just getting started. Here’s to the next 100 million members.
While our early adopters from May 2003 could have a (huge!) party, it would be a bit difficult for all 100 million of us to physically get together and celebrate. Turns out we could do it in a Boeing 747, but in order to do so we’d have to shrink our bodies down to the size of 0.96-inch (24.4mm) diameter gumballs!
In celebration of the occasion, our team of stellar Data Scientists pulled together some fun stats about our members and their professional profiles:
56,800 miles (90,900 km): length of the conga line formed by all of our members celebrating our latest milestone. That is equivalent to 9.76 round trips on the road between San Francisco and New York City!
74 profiles with Elvis impersonator listed as a position
1.3+ billion connections between our members
1,091 profiles with chocolatier listed as a position
79+ million job transitions/changes tracked
46 profiles with beatboxer listed as a position
428%: Year-over-year membership growth rate in Brazil, one of our fastest-growing countries
Lee, Smith and Kumar have alternated over the last 8 years as the most common last name of newly registered users
951 years: duration of back-to-back 5-minute phone calls made by 100 million professionals
50%: year-over-year growth in our iPhone skill index
4 profiles with dog or cat psychologist / psychiatrist listed as a position
Some industries with the fastest year-over-year new member growth rates: Education (175%), Facilities Services (121%), and Ranching (112%)
100% of Fortune 500 companies have executives on LinkedIn
1 profile has martini whisperer listed as a position
It’s the home stretch on college campuses across the country. Graduating students are looking for full-time jobs, while others are seeking summer internships. To help students during this intense time, we’ve built a Job Portal for Students and Recent Graduates providing easy access to entry-level jobs and internships at some of the best companies worldwide.
A better job search experience for students and graduates
While anyone can search and view job listings on the public Student Job Portal, Linkedin members with a completed profile and connections have a much richer job search experience:
We recommend jobs: Based on your education and interests, we’ll recommend jobs specifically targeted to you – right on your home page or with optional email alerts.
Put your network to work: Each connection you make expands your network, adding people who can provide insights into opportunities, or who can even help you land a job. Connect to fellow students and see where they’ve found jobs, reach out to alumni whose companies are hiring, and leverage the networks of your parents, family friends or mentors.
You can research companies: LinkedIn’s Company Pages provide rich insights to help you explore where you want to work. Learn who companies hire, what products and services they sell, what professionals are saying about them, and who you know who works there.
Companies find you: At the end of the day, it’s also a great opportunity to be found by leading companies. Companies continually comb LinkedIn’s member profiles for the best candidates. The more complete your profile, the better your chances of being found.
Find opportunities worldwide: The Student Job Portal is available in all languages currently supported on the site – and you’ll find jobs from top employers in locations around the world.
Quick Tip! To expand your network, join your University Alumni Group. Connect to fellow students and see where they’ve found jobs, reach out to alumni whose companies are hiring, and leverage the networks of your parents, family friends or mentors.
Partnerships with top companies and public service organizations
To support students and recent graduates, we are working closely with our customers to add high-quality entry-level jobs and internships to Linkedin that you will find through the Jobs Portal. And given the growing importance of public service jobs in today’s world, we are also reaching out to non-profit organizations and government agencies to include them in our program.
Now that the glow of Spring Break is starting to wear off, it’s time to get started.
More importantly, please share this with your friends – http://www.linkedin.com/studentjobs – especially, if they are right out of college looking for a job or an internship. #injobs
A little over a year ago, we launched our developer program to enable a world where LinkedIn members can access their business relationships anywhere and anytime they need them.
We’re excited to announce that one of our partner developers, Snaptu, has built a new LinkedIn application for feature phones using our development platform. This is a great example of how mobile developers can leverage the LinkedIn ecosystem and extend the LinkedIn experience to millions of our users.
Built on the Snaptu mobile app platform, this new LinkedIn app brings a smartphone-like user experience to over 2,500 different types of feature phone devices, about 80% of the devices sold worldwide.
Snaptu has focused on bringing the most commonly used LinkedIn features in their first release. With the new app, any LinkedIn user can:
View your update stream to glean insights from what your network is doing
Gather ‘meeting intelligence’ about the customers and partners you’re meeting with on a daily basis through search
Grow your network by inviting people to join your network (and by accepting their invitations)
Access your connections to see how their networks have grown, who you have in common, and what’s changed on their profile
View Update Stream
Search for People
Access Member Profiles
What’s Next?
The team at Snaptu has done a great job building the core LinkedIn experience on their platform. They are enabling mobile LinkedIn access for millions of our users in India, Brazil, and around the world, and we’re excited to be working with such partners on new ideas for the future.
The LinkedIn app on Snaptu is available for immediate download. Get it now.
The Q&A with Mayor Cory Booker has concluded. We hope to bring you excerpts from this event in the coming week. Thanks for joining us and see you next time! – Ed.
We’re excited to have Newark mayor, Cory Booker, visit LinkedIn today. Mayor Booker needs no introduction and is an outspoken champion of public policy causes ranging from education to combating crime.
We will be streaming his presentation and Q&A as part of LinkedIn’s Speaker Series in a few minutes. Stay tuned for more details.
Staying on top of industry news is something we think matters for any professional whose success depends on being well informed. With all the news websites, blogs, tweets and newsletters out there, staying in-the-know can be time consuming and it’s increasingly hard to figure out what matters most when reading news across multiple sources.
We’re very excited to announce the launch of LinkedIn Today, which delivers the day’s top news, tailored to you based on what your connections and industry peers are reading and sharing. If you only have five minutes to catch up on news, LinkedIn Today can help you cut through all the clutter, so you can discover the top headlines you need to read to be better informed everyday.
News from your connections and peers in the industry
LinkedIn Today is unique because it gives you three social views of professional news that don’t exist together in one place anywhere else on the web. We can deliver news that matter to your connections, your industry peers, and the wider professional audience.
1. What your connections and coworkers – people you know – are sharing.
You know and trust most of your connections and coworkers, so if they share an article, it’s a good signal that it’s something you should be paying attention to. By looking at the news articles being shared across your network and who is sharing it, we can highlight the top stories you should be paying attention to.
2. What your industry peers are sharing
Second, LinkedIn Today can surface the top few stories you need to read today to be informed on what’s happening in your industry or the industries you care about (for e.g. the Internet industry). We’ve heard from a lot of users that they may work in one industry, but they pay attention to news across multiple industries. For example, maybe they need to stay informed on the industries of their clients, or maybe they closely follow news in the industry they want to work in next.
By following industries, you can get the relevant news on your Front Page and in the top navigation. We’ll also send you a weekly email of the top industry headlines across all of the industries you follow. And, no matter how many industries you follow, we will only send you one news email per week.
3. What stories are interesting to a wider audience, outside of your industry:
Take advantage of the wisdom of the (professional) crowd, and see how news is trending across industries. Let’s say you find a story that’s one of the top stories in the Internet Industry – LinkedIn Today can also show you what other industries are sharing and discussing this story to help you connect the dots about the news.
Another unique aspect of LinkedIn today is the ability to follow multiple industries, and then find the top news across all of those industries in one place. Let’s say you work in the internet industry, and sell to customers in the healthcare industry. With LinkedIn Today, you can follow all of the industries that you care about (Internet, staffing & recruiting, and healthcare), and then come to one place to get all of your news.
Deeper insights into who’s sharing & discussing the news
Within any story that’s being shared, you can drill down to see who’s shared a given headline. We’ll show you the professional identity of the users who shared the story, along with what they are saying to get a sense of the conversation happening around a given article. You can even narrow your results with filters like industry and company. Only LinkedIn gives you this layer of professional identity and search capability on who’s sharing or tweeting an article.
Customized News on the Go
We are very excited to announce that LinkedIn Today is launching as part of the LinkedIn iPhone app as well. A lot of professionals read news on the go, so we wanted to have an easy way for users to get the top of the day, wherever they are.
Two unique features of the News app on the iPhone includes both the ability to see what your connections are reading and an option to save articles. Any articles saved on the iPhone will show up under “Saved” on linkedin.com/today, and visa versa.
We hope you enjoy LinkedIn Today, and that it helps you stay more informed in less time, while also allowing you to discover new and entertaining articles and sources. Today, all users can go to www.linkedin.com/today to see the day’s top headlines. Over the next few weeks we’ll be ramping up entry points on the homepage and in the navigation. (In the meantime, go to the more menu > News to access LinkedIn Today).
We are very excited to get your comments, feedback, and suggestions.
The live broadcast has concluded and you can read all about the news product we just announced – LinkedIn Today.
The live broadcast will start at 8:30AM Pacific today (March 10th, 2011). Please standby. – Ed.
Join us today as Deep Nishar and our product team will be talking about our upcoming product strategy. We’ll also be offering a sneak peak at some upcoming products we’re excited about.
Ed. note. This belongs to a series of posts on how external websites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality. Here’s Clara Shih, bestselling author on social media and CEO of Hearsay Social, a social media marketing and compliance solution for financial services.
This year, social media adoption by enterprise organizations is set to again grow exponentially. This is particularly important in the financial services segment, which is very much a relationship business.
Yet up until now, there have been barriers to using social media effectively and safely. Our research shows 33% of financial professionals have a LinkedIn account, but only 11% say they use it for business with the primary concern being around compliance requirements. We heard these frustrations and built Hearsay Social from the ground up to provide a social media marketing and compliance solution for financial services.
Our integration with LinkedIn’s private inbox API means we can provide complete archiving, filtering, and flagging for all public and private client conversations of financial services professionals, allowing effective business conversations to take place on LinkedIn and other social networking sites while ensuring 100% compliance. It doesn’t matter if your employees or advisors access LinkedIn from work, home, or a mobile device—Hearsay Social makes these conversations and connections safe, secure, and compliant. Given below is a quick video on how it works:
But we’ve found compliance alone is not enough. Employees, agents, and advisors need content, real-time feedback, and training to be successful on social media over the long term:
Content management: Give your employees and advisors timely, compliance-approved campaign and content suggestions through Hearsay Social to select and share with their local social network connections. They can pick and choose what works with their audience, and you don’t have to worry about someone accidentally saying the wrong thing.
Analytics: Learn what works and what doesn’t with Hearsay Social’s in-depth analytics. You can even drill down by region, sub-region, or individual employee to identify trends over time and in response to specific types of content.
Training. Hearsay Social specializes in addressing the unique challenges of deploying technology to a large number of employees and agents who are geographically distributed and have widely varying levels of social media familiarity. We provide complete training and support for both the corporate and local levels.
Hearsay is excited to team up with LinkedIn so that financial institutions can finally embrace social networking. I look forward to helping you and your employees become wildly successful on social media.
Ed. note: This post is a part of our continuing blog series featuring the secret lives of our colleagues. Here, we hear from our very own Michael Nguyen – a Food & Employee Services manager – whose passion for the food industry led him from his finance cubicle at LinkedIn to the task of managing LinkedIn’s growing culinary needs.
Here’s his story…
I’ve always had a passion for food.
And recently, I had a chance to make my dreams become a reality.
After working for LinkedIn’s Finance team for more than three years, an opportunity came up to pursue a lifelong ambition at the company of my dreams, though it would mean switching career paths. LinkedIn gave me a chance to move from my former position to join the Food & Employee Services team managing LinkedIn’s food program. Of course, this was a no-brainer for me. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to follow my passion and fulfill my dream of pursuing a career in the food industry.
LinkedIn, like other companies here in the Silicon Valley, offers perks like free food to our employees. But with free food comes a responsibility to include a balanced and healthy menu each day. And, I get to live out my culinary dreams by working with food vendors, chefs and caterers to help provide exactly that – a balanced assortment of food, beverages and snacks – to our employees. I am working with a health and wellness manager, Michael Susi, to create a healthier food program for our employees, which includes labels to educate employees about nutrition and the use of Metabolic Typing as the nutritional philosophy, along with an emphasis on whole, natural, and unprocessed foods.
So, what’s a typical day like for me as LinkedIn’s resident “Food Guy”?
Well, it starts with figuring out which catered meals to bring in and serve to employees each day. We serve about 850 catered meals a day for employees at our on-site cafe. When working with our vendors, I try to accommodate a variety of tastes – by polling everyone from our team of engineers to our executives on our LinkedIn Groups page. We have sushi every Tuesday, bagels and doughnuts for breakfast on Friday mornings, and Indian and Korean bowls are delivered weekly.
Working at LinkedIn has also allowed me to grow my passion outside of work. In June of 2010, my girlfriend Angela and I started a catering and events business called Calidogs. We’ve taken an all-American classic — the hot dog, and infused different flavors to adapt to local Bay Area culinary tastes. Some of our creations include the Calidog, made with Japanese-inspired flavors such as roasted seaweed; and the Salsadog, made with homemade salsa ceviche. (see pictures above – Ed.) What started out as a hobby has become a grassroots business with dedicated fans on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, among LinkedIn employees.
One of my personal highlights was serving my colleagues in the Mountain View office CaliDogs fresh on the spot for the first time and hearing a ton of great feedback from my colleagues across the company. What I enjoy most is the satisfaction I get when people say they enjoy my selections. There’s nothing more gratifying than hearing people tell me, “Today’s lunch was great.”
GitHub is a fantastic way for developers to collaborate with one other on software projects. It hosts code for many prominent open-source projects, including LinkedIn’s own Voldemort and Kafka. With over 600,000 developers hosting over 1.8 million projects, the work hosted on GitHub is essential to developers and professionals around the world.
Software developers know that the code they’ve written is one of the most important parts of their professional identity. It shows their involvement, interest, and dedication to their work. Now developers can showcase their projects on LinkedIn – the world’s largest professional community.
After you’ve installed the application and added your GitHub account on LinkedIn, check your Profile – your GitHub projects should appear automatically. Your network will now be automatically updated whenever you create, follow, or update a GitHub project.
Discover Projects in your Network
With this new application, you can now leverage the power of your professional network to discover new and interesting projects. Discover which of your connections are on GitHub, and follow their projects right from LinkedIn.
Even if you’re not a software developer, the new GitHub application will help you discover which of your connections are actively following and working on new software projects.
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