from AskMyDaddy

Counting LinkedIn members

You asked

How do I see how many LinkedIn users there are in my area?

MyLinkDaddy writes

There is no place to see actual numbers by location or area. But you can make a reasonable estimate. A few methods are shown below. The LinkedIn Your Network page at http://www.LinkedIn.com/network?trk=mh_network_all shows selected data for your network and various groups within it. Note that these numbers are for your people within 3 degrees of you only, and not in all of LinkedIn. The average user only has a few connections. So there likely are many more LinkedIn members than you expect or directly see.

1. The easiest and most imprecise technique uses the size of your network, which gives you a first order of magnitude estimate. For example, if there are 13 million LinkedIn members and your network has 6.5 million members, then there are 2 members for every 1 in your network, or a multiplier of 2.

This method only works if the group for which you’re obtaining an estimate has a similar distribution to the overall LinkedIn network. Even then it can easily be thrown off depending on your connections and the makeup of your network.

For example, my multiplier is 2 (it's actually lower but let's use this for now). LinkedIn says there are 150,000 people in Dallas where I live. Using the multiplier, I would estimate 300,000 members in LinkedIn. But this clearly is not a similar distribution. I'm connected to many people in Dallas where I live, including most of the top networked people. So this is not close.

2. A more accurate estimate can be obtained if you're a business member and can see the whole network. This approach works by running narrow searches and counting how many LinkedIn members are in and out of your network. Narrow searches are necessary to due to LinkedIn limits on the number of results displayed (500 in network and 100 out of network for the base business account).

The search should be neutral and not related to you and the people you connect to. For example, I ran the following searches for people near Dallas:

• Keyword: dog -> 115 people in my network and 21 out, for 84% in network
• Keyword: "quality control" -> 497 people in my network and 60 out, for 89% in network
• Keyword: crew -> 246 people in my network and 37 out, for 87% in network.

Remarkably the ratios fell within a narrow range. Based on them I could conclude that the 150,000 Dallas people in my network represent 85% of all Dallas members for a total of about 175,000 LinkedIn members in Dallas.