Microsoft has issued its latest batch of notes on LinkedIn's performance as part of its quarterly market update. I don't need to read them to actually tell you what they are, though.

I might as well have written this post last month, or last year, because Microsoft always throws in virtually the same two notes on LinkedIn's performance.

Sessions growth up, with "record engagement" and revenue improvement.

This is uncanny because, based on reports, it is said that LinkedIn seems to have set a record "record engagement" almost each quarter since 2018. It's the same update, same words always. And even impossible how every quarter might hit some new bar on what happens on LinkedIn interaction; the same thing which is supposedly shared by LinkedIn with us through Microsoft is that this is what happened. This is all there really needs to be told about opposing this aspect.

So, engagement of recording. More people apparently are just more active on LinkedIn all the time.

It doesn't tell you much but that's what we get.

What I can tell you is that LinkedIn usage is much different to its member count, the number that it actually reports to represent its audience.

For example, LinkedIn is eager to remind us that it now has a billion members, which is an enormous milestone for the app. But members and active users are very different, and every other social app uses the latter as their actual measure of in-app engagement and activity.

But LinkedIn, for some reason, keeps telling us how many people have signed up for an account.
You know how many have signed up to a Twitter (now X) account? Like literally billions, and were X to start publishing its 3 billion "members," everyone would shout hypocrisy at it because it still has only 500 million people who are active monthly users.

But with LinkedIn, that somehow is acceptable because it's a niche? Because it's never really a competitor in audiences of size either way?

I don't know, but I do know that based on LinkedIn's EU member count compared to usage, less than 30% of its EU members are active within the app.

Which, in turn, would then suggest that LinkedIn probably has only around 300 million or so active users.

Pretty good for a niche social network and LinkedIn is never designed like any of these mass-social apps, really. But then, what is there behind all that obscurity regarding this sort of report?

Not really, but again LinkedIn, for whatever reason only gives us a part of the total picture, for virtually all its metrics and keeps adding on things such as Stories and a video feed, somewhat like TikTok, because it also pretends to be almost like every other social application.

It isn't though, and unsurprisingly so, those elements will land flat in the context of LinkedIn.

Although that doesn't matter much, because LinkedIn is going to hit a record high engagement level again this quarter in any case and will keep playing a part in the larger business at Microsoft.

And Microsoft's too distracted trying to ram AI down the throat of everything it can find the time to stuff it with to bother much.

As long as LinkedIn's revenues keep climbing (up 10% this quarter), all is good.

Keep breaking those records, fellas.