LinkedIn Becoming Social Media Leader

LinkedIn, the online professional networking site, has been making all sorts of gains since the first of the year. Last month, the company announced  it reached the 200 million user mark. And now, news reports show LinkedIn exceeded analysts projections for both earnings and revenue at the end of the fourth quarter.

This buzz shows that the site is not one to be ignored when creating a social media strategy for your business or company. The numbers alone are a compelling enough reason to include LinkedIn in your online marketing plan:

LinkedIn recently surpassed Google+, according to Experian’s Hitwise, a Web data research company, ranking No. 6 among the top 10 social media sites. The top 3 remain: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Pinterest, at No. 4, and YahooAnswers, at No. 5, are ahead of LinkedIn at this point.

LinkedIn says that 74 million of its users come from the United States alone, and people conducted 5.7 billion searches on the social media site in 2012.

The changes LinkedIn has made to its personal and company page layouts, with the ability to place cover pages, similar to Facebook and Google+, as well as share status updates from the top of company pages, may have helped this boost in user numbers. Whatever the reason, if you have a business and don’t have a LinkedIn company page, it’s time to set one up now.