Whether you’re trying to get new clients, get quality job applications, or build brand awareness, LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B marketers. Over 1 billion business people use LinkedIn, making it the largest professional social network in the world.
But how does your target demographic use LinkedIn? Is your target audience even on LinkedIn? How do you effectively reach them?
Answers to those questions and more below, plus all the freshest LinkedIn demographic stats you need to know for your 2024 LinkedIn marketing efforts — and how to apply them to your LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Bonus: Download a free guide that shows the 11 tactics Hootsuite’s social media team used to grow their LinkedIn audience from 0 to 278,000 followers.
LinkedIn age demographics
1. 47% of LinkedIn users are millennials
Millennials make up the majority of users on LinkedIn with 47% falling into this generation. The Millennial generation includes those born between 1981-1996, making them between ages 28 and 43 in 2024.
Comparatively, 29% of LinkedIn users are part of Gen X and 15% part of Gen Z, although that will continue growing rapidly in the coming years.
Source: Statista
2. 60% of LinkedIn users are between ages 25-34
Straddling the line between Gen Z and Millennials, 60% of users are between the ages of 25 and 34. It’s important to keep this majority in mind when planning your LinkedIn content strategy (along with your own audience targeting research, of course).
Source: Statista
3. 30% of U.S. adults use LinkedIn
That’s about the same as TikTok, with 33% of American adults using that platform. LinkedIn doesn’t get talked about as much as trend darling TikTok, but this stat shows how powerful the platform can be for reaching your target audience.
Source: Pew Research
4. LinkedIn reaches diverse audiences
LinkedIn doesn’t have the most users in any one category compared to other social platforms, but it does reach a wide variety of people from different cultural backgrounds, income levels, age ranges, and more.
From a professional point of view, LinkedIn is a must-have.
Source: Pew Research
5. LinkedIn reaches 21% of U.S. adults ages 18-24
LinkedIn definitely isn’t going to be your go-to way to reach Gen Z, except in a professional capacity, but it does show once again that LinkedIn isn’t just for the “older” crowd.
Hiring managers especially should keep this in mind.
Source: MarketingCharts
6. 38% of LinkedIn users ages 30-49 regularly get news on the platform
That’s on par with other top social media platforms like TikTok (40%), YouTube (38%), and Facebook (40%).
Source: Pew Research
7. 30% of users ages 18-29 also regularly get their news on LinkedIn
This is included in the chart above, but it bears stating on its own. While more 18-29 year olds get their news from TikTok (44%) and Reddit (48%), 30% is still a considerable portion of this age demographic.
If you regularly post about either world or industry events, don’t fall into the trap of assuming your LinkedIn audience skews older. Almost a third of the people seeing your content are likely to be part of Gen Z.
LinkedIn gender demographics
8. 57% of LinkedIn users are male
The survey only allowed for choices of male or female, but 57% of survey respondents identify as male.
Source: Statista
9. “She/they” is the third most popular pronoun used by LinkedIn users
While this survey didn’t include actual usage figures, “she/they” was found to be the third most popular pronoun after “he/him” and “she/her,” and followed by “he/they,” “they/she,” and “they/he.”
10. 3.3 million LinkedIn users are likely transgender or non-binary
While there are no official LinkedIn statistics for this, a recent study found 1.6 million people located in the U.S. over age 13 identify as either transgender or non-binary, which is 0.6% of the population.
In Canada, the most recent census data available shows 0.33% of Canadians identify as transgender or non-binary, about 1 in 300 people.
If we assume 1 in 300 LinkedIn members also identify as either transgender or non-binary, that would be about 3.3 million people based on LinkedIn’s 1 billion strong user base.
11. 42% of LinkedIn’s leadership identify as women
This is great to see as the global average of women in the C-suite stands at only 28%, and 36% for senior management positions, according to McKinsey.
Source: McKinsey
LinkedIn income demographics
12. LinkedIn users have twice the buying power of the average online audience
Perhaps in line with the income range stats above, LinkedIn audiences have roughly twice the buying power of audiences elsewhere. That also aligns with the platform’s B2B-focused audience.
How do you reach these decision makers? By knowing when the best time to post on LinkedIn is… which Hootsuite tells you, unique to your specific audience, industry, and analytics results. Plus, auto-schedule your content to publish during your best times with one click.
13. 54% of U.S. LinkedIn users have a high income
LinkedIn is the second most popular social platform among people in the United States with high incomes with 54% of users falling into this income bracket. BeReal is first with 66% of users having a high income.
29% of LinkedIn users have a middle income and 16% have a low income.
Source: Statista
“High,” “middle,” and “low” weren’t defined in income ranges in that study, but a recent survey by Pew Research found similar results: 53% of respondents earning over $100,000 use LinkedIn, 34% of people earning between $70,000 and $99,000 do, 19% of people earning between $30,000 and $69,000 do, and 13% of people earning under $30,000 do.
Source: Pew Research
14. 32% of U.S. adults would make a purchase from LinkedIn
This is slightly up from 30% in 2022, following the trend of people being more familiar and comfortable with social media commerce across all major social platforms.
Source: MarketingCharts
15. 32% of LinkedIn users have a Master’s or Doctorate degree
Almost a third of LinkedIn users have either a Master’s or Doctorate degree, or equivalent. While not the same thing as income, higher education levels tend to correlate with higher incomes.
Another third (33%) hold Bachelor’s degrees, while 15% have a technical or vocational training background.
Source: Statista
16. 80% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn
It shouldn’t be a surprise that B2B marketers love LinkedIn the most of all social platforms. Wondering how to make the most of LinkedIn for your business? Check our complete guide to using LinkedIn for business.
Source: eMarketer/Inside Intelligence
LinkedIn location demographics
17. LinkedIn ads reach 75% of the U.S. population
LinkedIn ad reach varies around the world, with a total possible ad reach of 75.4% of people in the U.S. By comparison, LinkedIn ads can reach 70% of people in Ireland, 66.9% of Canadians, 65.4% of people in the United Kingdom, just to name a few.
Source: Statista
18. 214 million people in the U.S. use LinkedIn
The United States has the largest user base for LinkedIn: 214 million members, which is 77.4% of the total U.S. population over age 18, as of the most recent census.
Source: LinkedIn
19. 75% of LinkedIn users live outside the United States
With over a billion users, LinkedIn is a global leader in professional networking. Whether you’re trying to target audiences in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world, LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B.
Source: LinkedIn
20. LinkedIn has users in 200 countries worldwide
As said before, that includes 1 billion people, as well as over 67 million companies, and 134,000 schools.
LinkedIn says 238 million users are in North America, 267 million in Europe, 286 million in the Asia-Pacific region, 160 million in Latin America, and 62 million in the Middle East and Africa.
21. 99 million LinkedIn users live in India
The United States has the most LinkedIn users at 200 million (LinkedIn’s own statistics say 214 million), but India comes in second with 99 million users.
China has 60 million LinkedIn users, Brazil is a close fourth with 59 million, and the United Kingdom rounds out the top five with 35 million.
Source: Statista
22. 7 in 10 people in Singapore have a LinkedIn profile
Next to the United Arab Emirates and the United States, Singapore has the third highest potential reach rate on LinkedIn, reaching 72% of the population over age 18.
Source: DataReportal
23. Most LinkedIn users (36%) live in the suburbs
36% of LinkedIn users live in a suburban area, compared to 31% in an urban area and only 18% live rurally.
Source: Pew Research
24. 84% of U.S. LinkedIn users could see 25% of their jobs being automated by AI
It seems like everyone is talking about generative AI and its impact on our work lives and LinkedIn is no exception. Workers are either excited to use it to free up time or worried it will take their job (or both).
Since AI will impact most of our work at some point, talking about it on LinkedIn can earn you valuable views and connections.
Source: LinkedIn
How to pick the right demographics for your LinkedIn ad campaign
You don’t need to be super specific when targeting your LinkedIn ads. If you’re new to LinkedIn advertising, it’s often a better idea to keep targeting broad and narrow it down over time as you learn more about your audience.
The only LinkedIn demographic you need to have to run an ad campaign is location.
Besides that, you can also target by:
- Country
- Job function
- Job title
- Job seniority
- Company
- Company industry
- Company size
To target your ad campaign, go to Campaign Manager.
1. Create an ad, or edit an existing ad.
Click on the campaign group, then click Edit underneath an existing ad or create a new one to start or adjust your targeting.
(Not sure how to set up LinkedIn ads? Check our guide to advertising on LinkedIn.)
2. Go to the campaign details tab.
Scroll down to the Audience section to adjust your ad targeting.
3. Set location targeting.
First off, add or remove geographic locations to target. You can also choose to exclude people in locations you haven’t selected.
4. Set language targeting.
This targets the language people set their LinkedIn profile to, which may or may not be their default day-to-day language. (LinkedIn currently supports 26 languages.)
5. Set job title targeting.
This is the big one! Add all the job titles you want to target, including ones you know or think your audience would use to describe themselves.
There’s a setting at the top to target either their current job title, past title, or both.
6. Add or remove additional LinkedIn demographics to target.
You can choose to further narrow or expand your target audience based on many demographics, including:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Skills
- Years of experience
- Interests
- Industries
- What companies they follow
- Their company industry
- Company names they work for
- Company revenue
- Company size
You can include or exclude audiences based on any of these criteria.
Lastly, you can choose to activate Audience Expansion, where LinkedIn targets people similar to your identified audience to help boost your ad results. I’d recommend leaving this checked on.
After you’re done, click Save audience to save your changes.
Those are the basics for LinkedIn demographic targeting, but take your campaign further with these tips:
Start with an audience template
Overwhelmed with all the LinkedIn ads demographic targeting options? Try an audience template instead.
Instead of setting all your own attributes, click the Audiences button with the LinkedIn logo in the Audience section.
You can choose from many pre-defined audiences and either leave it as is, or edit it further to suit your campaign’s needs.
Save your audience
Saving your custom audiences will save you tons of time for future campaigns. Once you’ve selected all the targeting attributes you want, click Save audience at the bottom of the Audience tab.
Give it a name and, optionally, a description to help you remember what this audience is targeting, or a note to yourself for which types of campaigns to use it for.
To reuse a saved audience in the future, you can find it near the top of the Audience tab under Saved Audiences.
Expand your audience, don’t limit it
Instead of hyper-specific targeting, try opening up your audience with LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion tools. This will show your ads to more people, while still keeping it relevant to who you’re already targeting.
This can uncover new audience attributes that perform well, including website retargeting and contact targeting.
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