Top LinkedIn demographics that matter to social media marketers - The Crowdfire blog

When it comes to business networking, there is no platform that hits the mark the way LinkedIn does. LinkedIn has made itself popular for job seekers, recruiters, and people looking to network professionally. It is also a great space for people to hone their skills and develop niches as subject experts.

It’s important for people and businesses to create their space on LinkedIn right now. Especially because LinkedIn users take their content feeds seriously. This is what makes LinkedIn such a great platform for brands and businesses to establish themselves.

But more than anything else, it is necessary to understand the power of the LinkedIn audience and the kind of demographics it has to offer. Having an insight into these demographics can unleash marketing and business insights like no other, especially if you’re a social media marketer.

Not only does LinkedIn hold a plethora of information, contacts, and exclusive communities, but it also is a great place for marketers to advocate for themselves and the brands they work with.

This brings us to the main part of this article, which is to identify the top LinkedIn demographics that matter to social media marketers.

On a whole, LinkedIn’s global membership numbers boast 211M+ members in North America, 222M+ members in Europe, 237M+ members in Asia-Pacific, 132M+ members in Latin America, and 47M+ members in Middle East & Africa.

Which means LinkedIn has over 850 million members across the world. Here’s a map that indicates just how many members LinkedIn recorded as of 2021.

But these numbers probably don’t come as a surprise, since LinkedIn is a leading professional platform.

Given some of the other data published on the LinkedIn statistics site, LinkedIn averages 95 job applications being submitted every second, which means about 6 people get hired on LinkedIn. But that doesn’t mean that LinkedIn has been restricted to younger audiences on the lookout for a job alone.

Over 9 million LinkedIn members have turned on their ‘Creator mode’ since their launch, proving that the people on LinkedIn have now gotten a mix of subject experts — that range from CEOs and COOs to budding millennials who have become content creators of our generation.

All of these numbers make for a wonderful opportunity for LinkedIn affiliate marketing and most importantly, for social media marketing. So, if you are a social media marketer who’s written off LinkedIn as an engaging social platform, the numbers show otherwise.

Social media marketers consider it an advantage when a platform has a certain age group. It makes them understand the personas on a platform better, so this way they can alter their marketing communication to suit the platform and its users.

According to 2020 research in The United States, Statista shows that LinkedIn’s highest audience percentages are from people that are above the age of 46 years at 80%. While 38% comes from people between ages 36–45, and 36% from people between 26–35. It seems the lowest audience demographic comes at 19% of people who are ages between 15–25.

This clearly makes the argument that the main demographic doesn’t necessarily make LinkedIn just a job hunting ground for the younger audience, in spite of LinkedIn statistics averaging 50 million job seekers each week. Using LinkedIn analytics tools, social media marketers can evaluate the age group and other valuable insights.

It also shows that users beyond 46 who have reached better professional stages are on LinkedIn networking. This could mean they are creating better business models, exchanging experiences with peers, or even offering advice to the younger working generation.

When it comes to understanding the LinkedIn community, LinkedIn boasts 58 million active companies and 120 schools. This makes the education demographic an up-and-coming community on the platform.

The reason why the number of schools being listed on LinkedIn is rising could be because of 2 reasons.

One of LinkedIn’s 2021 campaigns was the ‘Inclusive Leadership for Managers Initiative’. Not only did this change the way people understood managers but it also created some stellar improvements right from interracial hiring, and management upskilling to sparking a feminist work culture.

According to LinkedIn’s data, “the number of Black and Latino leaders, managers and senior ICs at LinkedIn grew by 35% and 20.3% respectively in FY21.” Making this a major achievement for companies and for people that have been struggling with discrimination, etc.

In 2020, when the world was in lockdown, many racial issues took the stage and finally got people’s attention. This made companies and institutions reevaluate their pay scale and their hiring practices. Which is what makes LinkedIn’s initiative such a great success.

But it’s not only race hiring that was tackled. LinkedIn has quoted that “Globally, women represent nearly 42% of our company’s leadership”. Now while this number doesn’t represent the entire global workforce. It surely is a starting point for women everywhere.

But this does bring up the conversation of what LinkedIn’s average gender demographic look like.

According to Statista’s 2022 research on the Distribution of LinkedIn users worldwide as of January 2022, by gender, the data goes to show that the rate of men on LinkedIn is still higher than the rate of women. There are 57.2% of men while there are 42.8% of women.

This data only encourages the conversation that women are still not equal in the workforce and certainly by the looks of it, not even on a social media marketing platform such as LinkedIn.

But although the numbers showcase a majority of men globally, the American audiences work differently. According to the Pew Research center, there is a 2018 study of users on social media that show that an equal amount of men and women access LinkedIn in America 25%.

Of course, if you do pay closer attention to the data presented, you can also see how the Urban LinkedIn crowd in the United States takes predominance at 30%, leaving the Surburban crowd at 27% and the minority of Rural people at 13. However, the numbers for the global audience are perhaps different.

To summarize, LinkedIn now has some astonishing data that could change the way users use the platform. But more than that, it changes how social media marketers understand the platform.

LinkedIn has always been written off as the platform for the mature and older white male crowd. But, there is data that goes to show that there is a target group for every type of brand on LinkedIn.

It also seems to be a great platform to initiate feminist and race-friendly conversations, not to mention environmental conversations since businesses on LinkedIn are always looking to participate in initiatives that help the world.