One of many key advantages of the EU’s new DSA, not less than from a broader reporting and transparency perspective, is that giant social platforms working inside the EU area at the moment are required to report their month-to-month energetic consumer numbers, which, for some, is the primary time that they’re formally disclosing their energetic consumer numbers, versus broader, periodic milestone updates.

A kind of is LinkedIn, which is a platform that I’ve been significantly crucial of in its efficiency reporting.

For some motive, LinkedIn has lengthy gotten away with sharing solely member counts, i.e. the entire quantity of people that’ve signed up for a profile within the app, not energetic customers, regardless of each different social app reporting some type of utilization determine.

For example of how deceptive this might be, X/Twitter hosts over 2 billion profiles, although most of them are inactive, with its official consumer rely being 250 million.

That’s a major variance, which implies that LinkedIn’s newest studies that it now has 985 million members don’t actually imply so much with out further context.

However now, due to DSA reporting, we’ve got not less than a powerful indicator of what number of energetic customers the platform really has.

Final week, LinkedIn shared its EU consumer counts, with a full record of month-to-month energetic customers in every EU nation (due to Xavier Degraux for the heads up on this).

As you may see, LinkedIn lists “logged in” energetic members, in addition to total web site visits for every area.

So now we’ve got precise knowledge on the kind of site visitors LinkedIn is seeing within the EU, which supplies some beneficial context on your planning. Nevertheless it additionally reveals us what number of logged in customers LinkedIn is probably going seeing total.

Based mostly on these figures, we are able to evaluate the information to the member counts that LinkedIn has reported for every area.

Matching them up, roughly 40.28% of members in every EU area are energetic LinkedIn customers.

Which might most likely be pretty indicative of different areas, and utilizing these insights as a measure, matched in opposition to LinkedIn’s total member rely, we are able to then estimate that LinkedIn would at the moment be seeing round 397 million month-to-month energetic customers.

And we are able to even go additional than that. The common variation between MAU and DAU counts for all the main social media apps is 1.8, so based mostly on 397 million MAU, LinkedIn possible has round 215 million day by day actives. That might fluctuate so much, based mostly on the way in which that individuals really use the app. However, even so, it’s pretty protected to imagine that LinkedIn has now lower than 350 million MAU, and 150 million DAU, based mostly on these averages.

Which, after all, LinkedIn might simply share itself for readability. However 985 million members sounds higher, however due to our European brethren, we now have a clearer image of precise LinkedIn utilization.

In abstract, LinkedIn’s member rely stat, which it continues to report, is meaningless. What actually issues is how many individuals use the app, and extra particularly, how many individuals in your target market are energetic and current.

These numbers present some extra perception, which might issue into your planning.