LinkedIn hits 500mn usermark

Exhibiting impressive growth over the past two-quarters, LinkedIn now boasts of over 500 million people on its professional network.

In a blog post, LinkedIn announced, "We now have half a billion members in 200 countries connecting, and engaging with one another in professional conversations and finding opportunities through these connections on LinkedIn."

"The impact of half a billion professionals connecting and communicating is very real and very accessible to anyone who wants to take part today. We’re excited to think about the potential of what a highly connected global community of professionals can do and the value that is created for every member of the global workforce," said Aatif Awan, Vice President, Growth & International Products at LinkedIn.

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn at $26.2 billion last June when LinkedIn had 433 million registered users.

The company also added that it has over 10 million active jobs and around 9 million companies on the platform. While, United Arab Emirates is the country that's most connected (contacts), London is the most connected city. Users post 100,000 articles on the platform every week on average, LinkedIn said.

The professional networking site recently introduced several changes and add-on features to attract users to the platform, including an overhaul and a new Learning platform to help professionals learn new skills.

Not just this. LinkedIn is now even planning to transform the platform into a primary source of news consumption for the professional users. With machine learning algorithms and LinkedIn’s in-house 24-member strong editorial team, the company is offering a new feature called ‘Trending Storylines’ which enables users to access developing stories. The feature gets personalised according to your interests, networks, publishers and human editors.