LinkedIn celebrates 200 million users, and counting

LinkedIn announced that it passed the 200 million user milestone today and now has professionals from over 200 countries using the platform. The professional social network has grown over 100 million users in the past 22 months, and 50 million users in the last 11 months. 

The LinkedIn that we used to know was a virtual resume, but the platform has been busy revamping its core product. LinkedIn has been exploring the world of media and content, a strategy that Twitter and Facebook were also quickly adopting in the last six months. A completely redesigned site was launched to better encourage users to browse and share content and then the debut of “LinkedIn Today” followed to ensure that users could come to the site for resources and content related to their professions. LinkedIn then, in a lesser publicized new feature, added the ability to follow 150 leading influencers and their LinkedIn “blog posts” to find out what they’re thinking. After all, higher engagement equals higher advertising revenue.

The improvements seem to be paying off. LinkedIn revealed that it was garnering 172,800 new users per day. In other words, two new users are signing up every second. If you do the math, granted that the rate doesn’t change, LinkedIn may have around 261.5 million users by January 2014.

With 74 million users in the United States, accounting for the largest number of users from any one country, LinkedIn has a solid domestic foothold already. Its fastest growth is coming from overseas, with Turkey, Columbia, and Indonesia leading the way respectively. In a promising sign of its international growth (and more importantly in its mobile form), China, Brazil and India are three of the top five key players in LinkedIn’s mobile growth. Next to the United States, the runner ups with the most users are India, the U.K., Brazil, and Canada, respectively.

If you recall in August 2011 LinkedIn completely revamped its mobile app to critical acclaim in an effort to provide a better user experience for its fastest growing segment (mobile), and the design hasn’t changed too dramatically since then. In the last earnings announcement, which took place in November, LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner said that in Q3 25 percent of its unique visitors – a 13 percent increase since the same quarter the year before – were coming from its mobile apps.

With today’s announcement, LinkedIn’s stock jumped 1.12 percent and is currently $112.42 per share at the time of this writing.

You can check out LinkedIn’s celebratory infographic for its 200 million user milestone here.