LinkedIn announced Friday it has reached 300 million registered users, a jump from 277 million members at the beginning of the year. LinkedIn announced the 200 million user milestone in January 2013, which means the company has added an average of 6.6 million new users per month over the past 15 months.
This registered users figure is different from the number shared by other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Those companies share a "monthly active user" statistic, not total registered accounts. Instead, LinkedIn uses an engagement number produced by comScore to highlight their active audience, according to a company spokesperson.
According to that metric, LinkedIn and Slideshare, which the company bought in 2012, combined for an average of 187 million unique (monthly) visitors in Q4, the company reported during its last earnings call. That number may leave LinkedIn short-changed, however, as it does not include unique mobile visitors, a growing segment for the company.
Regardless of the exact number, one thing is certain: LinkedIn is growing, and the company plans to continue doing so with mobile as a focus. LinkedIn expects that 50% of its user traffic will come via mobile by the end of 2014, and recently added an Android app for SlideShare in an effort to build out its mobile offerings. The site already receives more than 50% of its traffic via mobile from countries like Costa Rica, Malaysia, Singapore and the UK, according to a LinkedIn blog post.
Continued growth will depend somewhat on how well LinkedIn is at building simple and relevant mobile products. With a growing user base, and many of those users visiting LinkedIn on a mobile device, the company is preparing its employees to handle the challenge, said Kiran Prasad, the senior director of mobile engineering at LinkedIn.
Part of this prep includes a company-wide training program referred to as "Mobilize," which requires all of LinkedIn's engineers to take weeklong iOS, Android and HTML5 training courses.
"The primary purpose of that is to just enable a larger and larger portion of our engineering workforce to be able to be mobile-enabled," Prasad explained. To date, about a quarter of LinkedIn's engineers have completed the training with the program still well underway.
Creating a successful app experience is a major focus for Prasad. User attention spans are shorter on mobile, and users who access LinkedIn via a mobile device tend to do so with more regularity, but in short stints, he said. Users who are new to the app, or even to the service in general, won't stick around long if the app experience isn't strong.
"If it takes five seconds for you to load the primary screen, that's like a huge chunk of your experience immediately gone," he said. "Especially in international environments where the carrier networks aren't super duper fast, speed is going to be literally one of our primary primary concerns for mobile."
One of those international environments is China, where LinkedIn recently launched a Chinese language site. The decision to add a Chinese-language site resulted from the mindset that the company needed stronger support for its major subset of users outside the U.S., according to Joff Redfern, VP of mobile products at LinkedIn. In total, 200 million of LinkedIn's 300 million registered users are outside the U.S., which includes just a sliver of the 140 million Chinese professionals that LinkedIn is hoping to add.
A focus on mobile isn't the only way the company hopes to expand moving forward, but it's certainly an important element for elevating that 300 million figure. With numerous apps already available and more expected later this year, there's a good chance that its 400 million mark is just around the corner.
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