502. How many active users does LinkedIn have?

John Espirian: 00:00:00

How many people are really active on LinkedIn? It's time to take a quick look in episode 502 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, an independent show all about LinkedIn best practice. And as usual, we're going to start with listener feedback in the Postbag section.

OK, we've got a nice collection of voice notes this week. Let's get started with some feedback from Hanne Møller.

Hanne Møller: 00:00:40

Hi, John, it's Hanne from Denmark here. I just listened to your podcast number 501 and I got to thinking about my own title tag on LinkedIn.

I changed it a long time ago to Marketing Magician and Brand Architect in Danish though, and that actually caught people's attention because now I get invitations from people saying that Marketing Magician was what got them curious in the first place. So, yes, it does work. Thank you for a great podcast. I love it. I'm a great fan. But you already know that. So, over now from Denmark. Bye.

John Espirian: 00:01:13

Nice one. Thank you, Hanne. And yeah, it's really important to get that part of your profile right. The headline does a lot of heavy lifting.

So if you haven't reviewed yours recently, it's time to go and take another look and make sure that especially the first 5 or 6 words really land with a lot of impact so that you can be memorable to your ideal customers. OK, let's move on to the next voice note. And this is a little bit of feedback again from last week's show. And this one comes from Mary Wu.

Mary Wu: 00:01:41

I was listening to episode 501. I have a little pushback on one of the things you mentioned.

You were talking about the verification badge and you didn't necessarily see a need for that. When I'm talking to clients that are in a field where they may have to have access to my sensitive information.

Somebody in banking or a mortgage broker or an insurance person, I like to encourage them to get the verified badge because then if somebody is looking at them or their profile on LinkedIn, they can see this person is actually who they say they are, and it puts just a little bit more trust in there. What do you think?

John Espirian: 00:02:29

Thanks for that contribution, Mary. It's always nice to hear an alternative opinion.

I don't deal with that many people who work in professional services, so I suppose it's not as much of a thing that's top of mind for me, but that's a reasonable point you're making, is that it's an extra trust signal and possibly it's something for people to keep in mind that maybe you'll look more trusted if you've got that verified symbol. And similarly, you might be more inclined to do business or communicate with people who've got one of those symbols on their profile, too. So, it is one to keep in mind.

OK, let's move on to a question, this time as a voice note again from Gillian Whitney.

Gillian Whitney: 00:03:08

Now that LinkedIn shows us links clicked and in our analytics, somebody had asked me, what about if we have an embedded podcast inside an article, if somebody clicks to listen that they're not actually leaving the article, so is that counted as a click or not? So anyways, that was my question. And actually do links inside articles, are they even being registered as a click or is that just checking on posts? So, that is my question.

John Espirian: 00:03:43

OK, thanks for that, Gillian. I think it's great that LinkedIn is reporting on the number of links clicked, but that does seem to apply only to shortform posts.

If we're talking about longform articles and where you can link out to other things, I don't believe those things are tracked and therefore there'll be no dashboard of links clicked. Perhaps they'll introduce that in the future. But shortform posts and longform articles and newsletters really are two different beasts on LinkedIn.

So, just a feature on one won't necessarily translate to a feature on the other. So, I wouldn't hold your breath on that one.

OK, last voice note contribution for the Postbag this week is actually a pair of voice notes, both from LinkedIn trainer Mic Adam.

Mic Adam: 00:04:18

How often do you need to change your LinkedIn profile? And more importantly, does it do anything for your visibility?

John, I have another one that comes from a couple of my customers last week that you could put in your Postbag, which is now that the message that you can press when somebody sends you an impersonal connection request is gone. How do you ask this person, you know, to explain why they want to connect with you?

John Espirian: 00:07:44

Well, thanks for that, Mic. On the first point about how often you should be changing your profile when you're still relatively new to LinkedIn, you're probably going to change it quite a lot as you kind of find your personal brand and find your voice.

I don't recommend changing a headline more than once every couple of weeks though, because that doesn't give, you know, your viewers enough time to latch onto one thing and give you any kind of feedback as to whether it's working. Once you've got a personal brand established, I wouldn't recommend changing too much.

I would maybe review your headline in your About statement every 6 months or so to make sure that whatever it is that you're focusing on comes out clearly in your messaging. So, early on, change it quite frequently, maybe a few times a month. But as you become more established, I think you can go down to maybe once or twice a year and that should do. As for the second point about how you go back and message people, so this is a feature that I lost recently as well.

So, you have in your My Network, you see a load of your incoming invitations and you can view all of them in one go. And then before now there used to be a little message link next to each item.

And most invitations that come through are not personalised, so you might never have heard the person before. You might be thinking, well, why should I accept this?

Maybe I want to send them a preliminary message before accepting to see, you know, what kind of response I get. I used to do that for a while. To be honest, I've stopped doing it now.

If I get any kind of good vibe from a person, I would just rather hit the accept button and then message them afterwards to say, you know, what brings you to my door? Was it a personal recommendation? How can I help you? And then I make a decision based on that.

So, if you were to take that same approach of maybe being a little bit more permissive in accepting the invitation and then messaging the person back and seeing what kind of response you get, and if they don't give you a response at all, or if they give you a response that is an obvious sales message or something else that you don't find agreeable, maybe that's the chance to then say, OK, this wasn't going to be a good connection and I'm going to go and disconnect, it's a little bit more work rather than maybe messaging someone before you've accepted. But that's the only option available to us. There seems to be no other way of sending a message to someone who's invited you before accepting.

So, that's the way it is, I'm afraid. But thank you for that question, Mic.

And the last question for the Postbag didn't come through as a voice note, but it did get posted inside our private Espresso+ discussion group. And I thought it was worthy mentioning here because it does crop up from time to time.

So, one of our Espresso+ community members, Mari-Liis Garcia, noticed that she was unable to use the invite to follow feature when looking at someone else's company page and she couldn't work out why that feature wasn't there. So, LinkedIn has a limit here.

So, if a page has fewer than: 5000

So, this process works on desktop and on mobile. Not sure why LinkedIn have come up with that restriction.

But anyway, if you do find a page that you like and that you would like other people to know about, probably the easiest way to do is just to copy the link to that page and then send out a load of direct messages to whoever you want to know about that and just say go and check this out. Maybe you want to follow it. But that'll be the reason why you sometimes don't see the invite to follow option.

This past week saw the introduction for me of the Private connection notes feature for Premium members of LinkedIn.

And it means that when you make a connection with someone, anyone who's a 1st-level connection of yours, you can add a little bit of text to their profile that only you can see.

So, it's a good way of jogging your memory, maybe keeping a conversation going, setting yourself some kind of reminder of something to mention in a future conversation. It's up to 500 characters long, only you can see it and then it appears on the top of their LinkedIn profile. You can go and edit it at any time.

It's available on desktop and mobile. The downside is you can't really use this as a kind of database where you could maybe go and search for a term that you've added to a private note.

You can't see a view of all of the private notes you've added or anything like that, but these private notes apparently do get logged on your LinkedIn data archive. So, if you go and download your data from LinkedIn in the Settings & Privacy, then those notes will come across.

It's a nice little feature, nice little bonus for Premium members. It'll only work on people that you're connected with, so you can't use this on people that you're maybe targeting and haven't yet connected with.

Will this be enough to convince anyone to go and sign up for LinkedIn Premium? Probably not, but it's one of those things where if you get enough of these small, useful features added together, it might ultimately be worth it for someone to go and upgrade.

Although, as I've often said before, for 90%+ of people I deal with on LinkedIn, most of them are not making use of the free version of LinkedIn properly, and therefore it's not probably worth shelling out a load of money to upgrade to LinkedIn Premium.

The main topic this week is the release of LinkedIn's Digital Services Act Transparency Report. Sounds very fancy.

n the EU in the first part of: 2026

And it's interesting because you can compare the stats that LinkedIn share with their world map of where all of their members are based, and you can work out from that what proportion of people are active on the platform. So, that's what I've done. I've crunched the numbers and let's take a quick look at what that means.

So, there are 13 EU countries where LinkedIn shows those countries on their world map of members and also discloses the number of monthly active users there have been in those countries. There are more countries in the EU than that, but there are only 13 where both sets of data are valid.

And if I look at all of those figures, I can see that across those 13 countries, there are 44.2 million monthly active users, out of a total number of users in those countries of 145 million people, which works out at 30% of those members in those countries are regularly monthly active on LinkedIn.

Now, that 30% activity figure is potentially useful because LinkedIn doesn't do the same kind of disclosures for any other territories around the world.

So, if we were to take that 30% and say, what if for all of the members around the world that are on LinkedIn, we have the same 30% level of monthly activity?

If that were the case, given that LinkedIn has told us that they have more than 1.3 billion accounts, if we assume the same level of activity of 30% that applies in the EU, if we apply that across the world, it would mean that There were about 390 million active LinkedIn users per month, I'd like to look at that figure. Just to put into context that there aren't really more than a billion people on LinkedIn, and certainly not at any one time.

It's more like 390 million people are regularly active. And LinkedIn doesn't even. They don't really define what it means to be regularly active?

Is it just logging in and scrolling your feed for a few minutes and then dipping out? Or is it someone who is actively going in and commenting and posting and so forth? I very much doubt it's the latter.

I think only a tiny proportion of those people who are even active on LinkedIn are actually doing those visible signs of engagement on LinkedIn.

t, even as we're here in late: 2026

If you are a regular on LinkedIn, you're one of those 390 million people around the world, and if you're a regular commenter and poster and sender of direct messages and so forth, then you're in an even more select group.

I'm going to finish by making what might well be my last appeal for people to come and join us in Bristol, which is just less than a couple of weeks away.

Our UpLift Live Nano event in Bristol at the Watershed will be on Thursday 17 September between 11am and 2pm It's a chance to meet up, have lunch, get your LinkedIn questions answered, and if you're brave, for you to volunteer to have your LinkedIn profile reviewed in front of everyone else who's going to be in the room. It's a small, intimate event, it's a chance to speak to me directly. And tickets are only £59, so go and grab yours now.

Go to https://jesp.me/nanobristol and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And I'd love to see you in Bristol very soon.

OK, that will do for now. As usual, please keep your feedback coming.

Please keep your questions coming, ideally via voice notes. And until next time, I'll speak to you all again soon.