LinkedIn Hits 300 Million Members And Is Getting Even More Aggressive About Mobile

LinkedIn just announced a major landmark: 300 million members around the world now use the service, with 67% actually coming from outside the United States.

Joff Redfern, VP of Mobile at LinkedIn, told Business Insider that when he joined five years ago, that number hovered around only 50 million members.

Not only is most of LinkedIn's userbase from abroad (India, Brazil, Great Britain, and Canada are all top contributors, and the company is starting to focus on growth in China), but nearly half of its traffic now comes from mobile. Redfern said that it was only about 8% three years ago, and he expects that LinkedIn will hit its "mobile moment" - when more than half of its traffic comes from mobile - later this year.

That shift aligns with LinkedIn's aggressive multi-app strategy. The company currently has five apps: Its flagship app for phone and iPad, Contacts, Pulse, Recruiter Mobile, and the recently released SlideShare app.

Overall, this mobile shift is a good sign for LinkedIn. Traditionally, the company has had to work to transform its image from a site that you only use every few years while actively job hunting, to a more dynamic social network that you should be interacting with and updating all the time. By making several different apps with different functions and clear daily uses, the company is increasing members' usage of the network.

On that note, however, that the company is still only revealing its total members, not its monthly active users, which is standard for other social networks. (For example, Instagram announced it had reached 200 million monthly active users several weeks ago.) "Monthly active users" is the metric that describes the number of people who use an app at least once a month. Total members only describes the number of people who have ever signed up for a service. LinkedIn's MAUs are likely to be much lower.