Oh, LinkedIn’s not going to love this.
One of many key advantages of the EU’s new DSA, at the least from a broader reporting and transparency perspective, is that enormous social platforms working throughout the EU area at the moment are required to report their month-to-month energetic consumer numbers, which, for some, is the primary time that they’re formally disclosing their energetic consumer numbers, versus broader, periodic milestone updates.
A type of is LinkedIn, which is a platform that I’ve been notably important of in its efficiency reporting.
For some cause, LinkedIn has lengthy gotten away with sharing only member counts, i.e. the overall quantity of people that’ve signed up for a profile within the app, not energetic customers, regardless of each different social app reporting some type of utilization determine.
For example of how deceptive this could possibly be, X/Twitter hosts over 2 billion profiles, although most of them are inactive, with its official consumer depend being 250 million.
That’s a major variance, which signifies that LinkedIn’s newest stories that it now has 985 million members don’t actually imply lots with out extra context.
However now, because of DSA reporting, we have now at the least a robust indicator of what number of energetic customers the platform really has.
Final week, LinkedIn shared its EU user counts, with a full listing of month-to-month energetic customers in every EU nation (because of Xavier Degraux for the heads up on this).
As you’ll be able to see, LinkedIn lists “logged in” energetic members, in addition to total website visits for every area.
So now we have now precise information on the kind of visitors LinkedIn is seeing within the EU, which supplies some precious context to your planning. However it additionally reveals us what number of logged in customers LinkedIn is probably going seeing total.
Primarily based on these figures, we are able to evaluate the info to the member counts that LinkedIn has reported for each region.

Matching them up, roughly 40.28% of members in every EU area are energetic LinkedIn customers.
Which might most likely be pretty indicative of different areas, and utilizing these insights as a measure, matched in opposition to LinkedIn’s total member depend, we are able to then estimate that LinkedIn would presently be seeing round 397 million month-to-month energetic customers.
And we are able to even go additional than that. The typical variation between MAU and DAU counts for all the main social media apps is 1.8, so based mostly on 397 million MAU, LinkedIn probably has round 215 million every day actives. That might fluctuate lots, based mostly on the way in which that individuals really use the app. However, even so, it’s pretty protected to imagine that LinkedIn has now lower than 350 million MAU, and 150 million DAU, based mostly on these averages.
Which, in fact, LinkedIn might simply share itself for readability. However 985 million members sounds higher, however because of our European brethren, we now have a clearer image of precise LinkedIn utilization.
In abstract, LinkedIn’s member depend stat, which it continues to report, is meaningless. What actually issues is how many individuals use the app, and extra particularly, how many individuals in your audience are energetic and current.
These numbers present some extra perception, which might issue into your planning.