When LinkedIn surpassed 100 million members, the official LinkedIn Blog published an interesting set of fun statistics. All joking and funny statistics aside, LinkedIn is an extraordinary powerhouse of a site. If you’re not using it for recruiting top talent, business development, market research, prospecting for sales, lead generation and nurturing, branding, pr, and content delivery to your target market – then you’re leaving a pile of money and opportunity sitting on the table.

Here’s a couple of simple examples to illustrate how poorly most people and companies use LInkedIn:

We created a simple one-page self-assessment for executive job seekers to evaluate their LinkedIn Profile to determine whether it was effective in attracting the attention of recruiters, hr managers, and hiring executives. Over 1000 executive job seekers sent us back their completed profiles – less than 10% met a minimum standard.

In a recent survey of company hiring practices in the Vistage and TEC Community of companies in the $5-$50 million revenue size, less than 5% use LinkedIn as a proactive sourcing tool to find passive candidates.

In our Executive Search Practice for high level sales professionals and sales managers,we discovered through in-depth interviewing that less than 20% leverage LinkedIn effectively for referral networking – yet referral networking has proven to be the most viable method of generating sales for products/services which lend themselves to solution selling vs. transactional selling.

What’s wrong with this picture?

If LinkedIn is such an effective tool and resource, why do so many professionals and companies underutilize it?

Is it a training issue – most professionals and companies don’t know how to leverage LinkedIn? Then the question surfaces of why they are not getting training? Is it a unconsciously incompetent issue – we don’t what we don’t know. Is it that there is a steep learning curve and no one wants to take the time to come up the learning curve because they don’t yet buy into the value from using LinkedIn?

Help me out – I’m curious why you’re not rushing to start using this amazing tool. Even if you just use it for recruiting great talent and prospecting for ideal customers, are you still not convinced it could bring better people to your company, reduce sales costs, and improve lead generation?

Here’s a few fun statistics from LinkedIn about their membership:

 

• 1,091 profiles with chocolatier listed as a position
• 79+ million job transitions/changes tracked
• 46 profiles with beatboxer listed as a position
• 428%: Year-over-year membership growth rate in Brazil, one of our fastest-growing countries
• Lee, Smith and Kumar have alternated over the last 8 years as the most common last name of newly registered users
• 951 years: duration of back-to-back 5-minute phone calls made by 100 million professionals
• 50%: year-over-year growth in our iPhone skill index
• 4 profiles with dog or cat psychologist / psychiatrist listed as a position
• Some industries with the fastest year-over-year new member growth rates: Education (175%), Facilities Services (121%), and Ranching (112%)
• 100% of Fortune 500 companies have executives on LinkedIn
• 1 profile has martini whisperer listed as a position

To see all the fun statistics, click the link below:

The LinkedIn Blog – 100 Million Gumballs

Barry Deutsch