Oh, LinkedIn’s not going to like this.
One of the key benefits of the EU’s new DSA, at least from a broader reporting and transparency perspective, is that large social platforms operating within the EU region are now required to report their monthly active user numbers, which, for some, is the first time that they’re officially disclosing their active user numbers, as opposed to broader, periodic milestone updates.
One of those is LinkedIn, which is a platform that I’ve been particularly critical of in its performance reporting.
For some reason, LinkedIn has long gotten away with sharing only member counts, i.e. the total number of people who’ve signed up for a profile in the app, not active users, despite every other social app reporting some form of usage figure.
As an example of how misleading this could be, X/Twitter hosts over 2 billion profiles, though most of them are inactive, with its official user count being 250 million.
That’s a significant variance, which means that LinkedIn’s latest reports that it now has 985 million members don’t really mean a lot without additional context.
But now, thanks to DSA reporting, we have at least a strong indicator of how many active users the platform actually has.
Last week, LinkedIn shared its EU user counts, with a full list of monthly active users in each EU nation (thanks to Xavier Degraux for the heads up on this).
As you can see, LinkedIn lists “logged in” active members, as well as overall site visits for each region.
So now we have exact data on the type of traffic LinkedIn is seeing in the EU, which provides some valuable context for your planning. But it also shows us how many logged in users LinkedIn is likely seeing overall.
Based on these figures, we can compare the data to the member counts that LinkedIn has reported for each region.
Matching them up, approximately 40.28% of members in each EU region are active LinkedIn users.
Which would probably be fairly indicative of other regions, and using these insights as a measure, matched against LinkedIn’s overall member count, we can then estimate that LinkedIn would currently be seeing around 397 million monthly active users.
And we can even go further than that. The average variation between MAU and DAU counts for all the major social media apps is 1.8, so based on 397 million MAU, LinkedIn likely has around 215 million daily actives. That could vary a lot, based on the way that people actually use the app. But, even so, it’s fairly safe to assume that LinkedIn has now less than 350 million MAU, and 150 million DAU, based on these averages.
Which, of course, LinkedIn could just share itself for clarity. But 985 million members sounds better, but thanks to our European brethren, we now have a clearer picture of actual LinkedIn usage.
In summary, LinkedIn’s member count stat, which it continues to report, is meaningless. What really matters is how many people use the app, and more specifically, how many people in your target audience are active and present.
These numbers provide some more insight, which could factor into your planning.