LinkedIn crosses the 200 million member mark

The social network is adding two new members every single second

(Updated to reflect comment from LinkedIn)

LinkedIn certainly has reason to celebrate this Wednesday morning. 

The social network for professionals has crossed the 200 million member mark, the company announced in a blog post. It now has representation in over 200 countries and territories around the world, serving members in 19 different languages.

The network reached the 100 million mark in March 2011, just ahead of its IPO.

"I’d like to thank each of you for helping build the LinkedIn network into what it is today. It’s been amazing to see how our members have been able to transform their professional lives through LinkedIn. You truly grasp the power of LinkedIn when you start to focus on these individual success stories," Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior VP of products and user experience wrote.

LinkedIn supplied this handy infographic to celebrate the news, with some impressive stats.

The most LinkedIn members come from the United States, which has 37% of its total membership, with 74 million. The second largest LinkedIn membership is in India, which only has 18 million members. The United Kingdom and Brazil each have 11 million, and Canada has seven million.

The fastest growing countries, based on year-to-year growth from 2011 to 2012, are Turkey, Colombia and Indonesia, while it is seeing the fastest mobile growth in China, Brazil, Portugal, India and Italy.

LinkedIn is growing so fast that it is adding two new members every second, or 172,800 a day.

In October, LinkedIn debuted a new feature to allow users to follow, and receive updates from, high profile users who would be sharing unique knowledge and professional insights. The most followed of these are Richard Branson, Barack Obama, Deeprak Chopra, Tony Robbins and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. 

Finally, LinkedIn says, if it were a country, it would have the fifth largest population in the world, bigger than France, the United Kingdom and Italy combined.

How does LinkedIn compare?

This is big news for LinkedIn, but it does pale in comparison to some of the other social networks.

Facebook, of course, is the big dog, with its one billion monthly active users that it announced in October. No one could possibly expect a more niche network like LinkedIn to compete on the same level.

But it also comes up shy against both Twitter and Google+.

Twitter revealed in December that it had 200 million monthly active users, the same size as LinkedIn's entire userbase. It was announced back in July that the site had a total of 500 million users, and that number has surely grown since then.

In December Google+ announced that it had over 500 million users, 235 million of which are active across Google (by +1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search, for example) and 135 million who are active in just the stream.

There is no indication of how many of LinkedIn's members would be considered "active" and a LinkedIn spokesperson tells VatorNews that the company does not disclose that number.

LinkedIn's stock is up 1.39% Wednesday, trading at 112.72 a share.

Here is the entire infographic from LinkedIn: