This week’s main topic looks at how many active accounts there are on LinkedIn. See my LinkedIn membership tracker, particularly the updated section titled “How many active users are on LinkedIn?”
Postbag.
What do you think of people customising their pronouns?
In short, don’t do it!
Do text-only posts perform less well than posts with images?
Looking at my own data since the start of 2024, my text-only posts get 27% more impressions than my posts where I include an image.
Other topics.
Lynnaire Johnston’s livestream with Mark Williams (creator and former host of this show) at 8pm on Wednesday 10 December 2025: “LinkedIn, Legacy and Letting Go”.
UpLift Live 26 LaunchPad calls for those attending or considering attending our conference on LinkedIn best practice:
I’m speaking in Milan, Italy at Inspire Day, on 29/30 January 2026.
Congratulations to Gus Bhandal on the launch of his The Squeeze membership!
Full transcript.
How many people are really active on LinkedIn? We’re going to take a look in this episode of the independent podcast all about LinkedIn best practice. It’s Informed, episode 470.
Welcome back to the Informed podcast. I’m John Espirian, your host, and as usual, we’re going to crack on with a couple of questions from the Postbag.
OK, first question comes to us from Espresso+ member Jeremy Freeman, who asks: what do you think of people customising their pronouns?
OK, so on your LinkedIn profile you have a field that you can edit in the top card that lets you show to the world which pronouns you prefer when people are talking about you.
Initially, this was put in to allow people to indicate whether perhaps they preferred to be known as they/them or he/him or she/her, and there are also custom options that you can change. And what we’ve seen is that a lot of people have jumped on a kind of marketing bandwagon and used this field to put in not pronouns but some other marketing message, because if you select the custom option, you can actually write up to 25 characters and you could use that to cram in some kind of message.
But that was not the intention of that field. That’s not why LinkedIn put it in, and although it can be hijacked for other purposes, I don’t think that really is good optics. It’s not what the field is for. I don’t think it’s a good look, and if you want to convey your service offering or your personality in some way, I wouldn’t say that’s the field to do it.
I said last week that it’s probably not a good idea to put emojis in your Name field because that could get you banned. I don’t think there’s any evidence that using some kind of weird thing in your pronouns field to deliver a marketing message will get you banned or anything like that, but I still don’t think it’s a good look and therefore I wouldn’t recommend that you do it.
So, either use the field for your genuine pronouns that you would like to be known by, or just leave the field blank altogether.
The other question I got for this week is from Caryn Yuen, who was asking the following: there are quite a few LinkedIn experts who seem to attach an image to every single one of their posts. Do text only posts perform less well than posts with images?
Well, good question, Caryn, and I can bring some of my own data to bear here, although my default answer is always to test this for yourself to see what works for you and for your audience. But I’ve been tracking my own analytics and I can share my data here.
So, I’ve looked back from now and we’re late 2025 as I record this back to the start of 2024 to see how my posts worked out. I looked at 172 posts that were text plus image and they had an average impression count of 2394.
I looked at the 59 posts that I did that were text only and those received impression counts of 3035. So, doing the numbers on that means that my text-only posts received about 27% more impressions than my posts where I included an image.
So, for me, it seems as though my audience would prefer, or at least LinkedIn is showing more impressions when I write text-only posts. But as I said, I’ve only done 59 of those posts in the last almost two years, whereas I’ve done 172 posts that are text plus image.
So, if I were optimising for a bit more visibility, I suppose I would do more text-only content. But again, to repeat the point, that’s just my data doesn’t mean that it would be true for you.
Perhaps you should do some experiments and track it over a month or two to see what actually works for your experience on LinkedIn and what your audience resonates with most. But I think, certainly based on my own data, I don’t think that an image is absolutely necessary on every post you put out.
Main topic this week is to look at how many active users there are on LinkedIn. It’s a common question I get, and LinkedIn don’t explicitly report on this, but every quarter Microsoft releases its earnings figures in a conference call with some data that comes out, and I log these things on my website, and also LinkedIn release updated versions of their Pressroom page where they have a world map of where all the members are based. And they also produce for the EU specifically the Digital Services Act Transparency Report.
The latest one of those came out in August 2025 and that covers the period for the first half of 2025. So, I looked at those figures and in there they report on the number of monthly active users in the various EU countries.
So, what I did is I took those figures and I compared them with the total number of users in each of those countries as reported on their Pressroom map and I used that to work out what proportion of the total users in each country were active. So, for example, their DSA report suggests that there are 1.9 million monthly active users in Belgium.
Their Pressroom page suggests that there are 5 million users in total in Belgium, and if you do the maths on that, that means that there are 38% of people who are active in Belgium – if those numbers are to be believed.
So, I’ve kind of gathered all of those numbers for all of the countries who are in this report and also who are mentioned on the map and kind of worked out an average number of people who are active on the platform. Now, I’ve summarised all of this on my blog and I will link to that in the show notes. It’s hard to convey all of the details in audio form because I’ll probably lose you if I do that.
But what it boils down to is that of the countries I looked at and have data for the average number of accounts that are active, that proportion is about 34%.
The reason I think that is useful is that if we were to extrapolate, OK, so if we take that 34% and say, let’s imagine that percentage was true for the whole world and not just for the EU, we can take the number of accounts that are on LinkedIn, which most recent stats say is around 1.3 billion, and that gives us a number of something like 442 million active LinkedIn users.
I suspect, I have a hunch that it’s a bit less than that. The last time I worked this out, it was closer to 350 million.
But sometimes we hear the headline figures of “more than a billion” users on this platform, but actually we’re saying maybe somewhere between 350 and 450 at tops million active users on the platform.
As I say, I will link to the full article that’s on my website, so you can dig into the details and check the numbers for yourself if you wish. But there you go, that’s how many active users we think are on LinkedIn at the moment.
Lynnaire Johnston in New Zealand is going to be running a LinkedIn Livestream with Mark Williams, who is the longtime previous host of this show. It’s probably going to be Mark’s last appearance on any kind of livestream, I imagine, and that is taking place at 8pm UK time on Wednesday 10 December. So, it should be a fun event, and we’ll be hearing a bit more about Mark’s journey in making this podcast and I’m sure a load of other things. So, I’ll certainly be tuning into that one, so look out for that. And again I will include a link to that in the show notes that accompany the episode.
For those of you who are coming to the UpLift Live 26 conference in March, we’ve got a couple of Zoom LaunchPad calls which are designed for people who’ve got a ticket or who are thinking of buying a ticket to the conference. So, those are coming up. I’ll give you the dates for those.
The first one is a public call so it’s available to everyone even if you haven’t already got a ticket. That’s on Thursday 8 January 2026. That’s at 11am UK time, so put that one in your calendar. And the other one is Friday 20 March 2026, that’s just a week before the conference at 1pm UK time. That one will be for ticket-holders only.
These are half-hour calls just to give you a chance to meet the other people who are going to be coming to conference so that you feel a bit more comfortable when you walk into the room for the main conference itself. So, look out for the details of that. If you’ve already got a ticket, we’ll be sending you the details via email.
If you haven’t got a ticket and you want to know anything more about the conference, please drop me a line. I’d love to see you at these calls. They’re always good fun and, yes, really looking forward to the conference next year.
Something else that’s happening next year is that I’m going to be taking a short trip to Milan, Italy. I’m going to be speaking at Inspire Day. I was invited by Alessandro Gini who came over actually to Birmingham to attend UpLift Live 25 and he’s very kindly invited me to come over and speak in Italy. So, that event is a 2-day event. It’s 29/30 January 2026. You can find out more at inspireday.it if you’d like to come along.
I’m looking forward to going abroad and speaking about LinkedIn for the first time, so really looking forward to that one.
Going to end with quick congratulations for my UpLift Live co organiser on Mission Control, Gus Bhandal.
He’s launched his own membership called The Squeeze and has already managed to get almost 50 members. His doors for the membership are currently closed but I believe they’re reopening around March 2026, so look out for that.
He’s running a LinkedIn-focused membership there, so well done, Gus. I know from almost 4 years of experience that running a community online is not an easy gig. So, really wish you all the best with that.
OK, that is all for now. I realise that we are approaching the Christmas period. I don’t have any plans to stop making episodes anytime soon, so you should be able to expect one for next week. As usual, if you’ve got anything that you’d like to see go into the Postbag, please drop me a line.
If you’d like to send me a voice note for inclusion in the Postbag, feel free to do that. And if you have any other general questions about LinkedIn best practice, then that’s what I’m here for. That’s what I train people on. So, yes, please fire away with any questions you have. And until next time, I’ll see you soon. Take care.
