Microsoft announced the results for the 2018 quarter which ended in September 30.
The company noted that it experienced a 19 percent increase in revenue, 29 percent increase in operating income, 38 percent increase in net income, and a 36 percent increase in diluted earnings per share. A great report from Microsoft, with one of the most notable coming from LinkedIn.
After Microsoft acquired LinkedIn back in 2016, the platform no longer needs to report its individual quarterly performance numbers. What this means, LinkedIn is not required to be transparent about the number of its users, engagement metrics, revenue stats and so forth.
But as part of Microsoft's report, the tech giant reported that:
Combining Microsoft's report with LinkedIn saying that it hit 575 million members back in August, people can indeed say that everything is going well with the professional-oriented social media platform.
While out of its claimed 575 million members, only a small fraction of them are actually active on a regular basis, previous research suggested that LinkedIn had about 250 million MAU (monthly active users) when it was on 500 million members.
Others have suggested that LinkedIn's active usage rate is at around 25 percent of LinkedIn members at any given time.
But if engagement on the platform is at "record levels" as Microsoft said, those speculated figures may actually look different. Previously, LinkedIn has reported engagement increases even higher than this.
Earlier, LinkedIn said about improving its algorithms, noting that the vast majority of engagement actions occurred on a tiny fraction of posts from top users. The algorithms update tries to fix that by re-distributing a wider range of user contents within feeds.
For marketers, LinkedIn has become one of the gold mines out there. This can be seen with the following statistics:
- More than 60 million LinkedIn users are senior level influencers, and 40 million of them are in decision-making positions.
- LinkedIn is the number one channel B2B marketers use to distribute their contents.
- More than 50 percent of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs come from LinkedIn.
- More than 90 percent of marketing executives list LinkedIn as the top place to find quality content.
- About 80 percent of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, 13 percent came from Twitter, and 7 percent from Facebook.
- LinkedIn generates three times more conversions than Twitter and Facebook.
- 65 percent of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn.
- 90% of B2B marketers have reduced their cost per lead with LinkedIn;s lead generation forms.
Clearly here, LinkedIn has passed its darker past, and is seeing a brighter future. And that, thanks to Microsoft.