LinkedIn Reports ‘Record’ Engagement Once Again in Latest Performance Update

LinkedIn’s parent company Microsoft has released its latest earnings results, which includes notes on LinkedIn’s evolving performance, and where it’s seeing strength.

And you’ll never guess:

LinkedIn saw “record engagement” once again in the period, which it has in every reporting period since the dawn of time.

Well, the dawn of LinkedIn under Microsoft at least. The tech giant acquired LinkedIn back in 2016, and since then, Microsoft has only included minor performance notes like the one above about the professional social app within its broader company report.

And every one, except a single result in July 2020, has been virtually the same, noting “record” engagement. Every single quarter.

Which seems impossible, but there’s not a lot of info to go on, so it’s impossible to refute, or to litigate any data yourself. You just have to take Satya and Co.’s word that LinkedIn is really seeing record amounts of usage.

But for added context:

LinkedIn currently claims over a billion “members” around the world, a number that continues to grow every year.

Because of course it does, because LinkedIn isn’t reporting active users, which would fluctuate over time. It’s reporting the total number of people who’ve signed up to the app.

Which is a useless stat. Billions of people have signed up to every major social media app. Twitter, for example, was reportedly looking to free up over 1.5 billion dormant @handles shortly after Elon Musk took over at the helm.

But that doesn’t mean that LinkedIn has an addressable audience of a billion people, or even close to that figure.

Indeed, based on the data that we do have, LinkedIn’s EU usage data (which it has to share under the DSA), we can see that, in Europe at least, only around 40% of LinkedIn’s total members are regularly logging into the app.

That, presumably, would carry over to other regions. So really, LinkedIn only has around 400 million actual, active users.

I don’t know why LinkedIn has stuck with this metric as an indicator of its success, nor why the broader market accepts it. But then again, “a billion” members sounds better than “400 million” users, and if that’s all they have to share, why change it?

Hokey metrics aside, Microsoft has also reported that LinkedIn revenue grew 9% in the latest period, with all of its business elements seeing stronger performance.

LinkedIn continued to expand and improve its ad offerings in the most recent quarter, including updated ad attribution, and the addition of paid boosting for personal posts. It also continues to lean into AI, guided by Microsoft’s broader partnership with OpenAI, with more AI assistance elements for job seekers, and a push towards the “Agentic Era” of connection.

LinkedIn also updated its link previews in organic posts last May, making the preview images much smaller for non-LinkedIn Premium subscribers, and it’d be interesting to know how that’s impacted overall Premium take-up (Premium Subscriptions, you’ll note, is specifically mentioned as a growth element in Microsoft’s overview).

(Update: In Microsoft's earnings webcast, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reported that LinkedIn's Premium revenue exceeded $2 billion in 2024, up from $1.7 billion in 2023.)

LinkedIn’s also making a bigger push on video content, which is the fastest-growing element in the app. LinkedIn says that its TikTok-like immersive video feed saw 36% usage growth last year, and in line with this, it’s now also testing a larger video playback window in the main feed.

It also added a new in-app game last quarter, and it’s reported that its basic puzzle games are catching on, with 80% of users who play a game returning to play the following day.

I doubt that puzzle games are ever going to be a major LinkedIn element, but it could be another factor helping to contribute to that “record” engagement.

At the same time, another of LinkedIn’s engagement growth elements did take a hit, with the platform forced to remove its gold “Top Voice” badges for contributions to Collaborative Articles.

Collaborative Articles stem from questions generated by LinkedIn’s AI, then pitched to members. The main lure of contributing to such had been that by doing so, you can get these badges, which can help to make your profile stand out in-stream.

But now, LinkedIn’s removed them, because too many non-experts were cheating the system. Which means the incentive for contributing to these posts is now far less.

LinkedIn reported last March that Collaborative Articles had seen a 4x increase in weekly member contributions quarter-over-quarter.

Hopefully engagement with its games can counter that dip.

Overall, there’s not a heap to go on with LinkedIn’s numbers, though it does seem that the platform is seeing more engagement, especially with video content.

If you were to take anything away from this, that’s where I’d be looking, in investing in video to expand your LinkedIn presence, while also engaging with relevant conversations to make more connections.