Just before LinkedIn announced a new $1.2 billion stock offering on Tuesday night, I decided to take a look at LinkedIn’s more personal stats to see how accurate the company’s data really is.
To do this, I linked the data to MSN’s main page. In the comments section on the entry I linked to, you can check out LinkedIn’s total MAUs, average daily active users (advertisers view the SERPs), users who are visiting the company’s profile page, users who have made connections, and users with family and friends.
What looks like personal information isn’t always. For instance, my all-time LinkedIn 1.0 representative, who incessantly, posts about guest conferences with the AMA on the same day of the event, was not personally affiliated with LinkedIn. He is merely a random, nondestructive person who doesn’t really care about his LinkedIn status. However, his profile data appears in our table above.
Your expectations of the data will vary. I’ve always suspected that, for some small number of people, at any given time, lots of people have LinkedIn and not LinkedIn. What I was hoping to learn is whether the higher-than-usual percentage of LinkedIn users (and non-users) over 150 have signed up for a LinkedIn identity, that LinkedIn does indeed count public and closed accounts as active, and that LinkedIn connects people with the same person and a connection on the same day of the event, but that LinkedIn only shows people with a LinkedIn identification once during the course of an active day.
What I don’t get is whether any of these 90% claims are happening in real time and should be added to your profile — they’re just facts I don’t want to mention until they are.
Check out the interactive table below to find out more about how LinkedIn generated those 90% claims for those 90% of users.
As for the other 89% (and I type “9″ here for some reason), the correlation is roughly 100-fold with higher-than-usual daily MAUs, more LinkedIn open user numbers, more LinkedIn searchers (there’s a separate table), and more users in the network at any given time. Once I start tracking MAUs in relation to search queries, everything looks pretty transparent.
Why isn’t LinkedIn claiming search referrals and not just listing them in reports? That’s a big question because of how often users click search on the first page of an image (like people on LinkedIn.) You could say they’re all working at The Monkeys. You wouldn’t guess that they’re also sharing their account information over a live view or as the result of a search on Facebook.
I’m building my own data model for disclosure purposes. My work on this thesis was aided by Graham Fraser, the creator of this table. He won’t sell it, but we’ll accept it for free at discoverwithbliss.com. Can you suggest ways for the average CIO and CEO of a big company to sign up for our data to leverage their ecosystem to become more productive?
