LinkedIn is one of the most prosperous social networks in Internet. Dedicated to professional target, this working network is an sufficient proof to become a benchmark for any individual or company with a history of business. Among its advantages are the reliability, mean age about 40 years, the opportunity to explain facets of the curriculum online, and the chance to add references to other users.

If we know that we can add to these advantages that LinkedIn offers the facility to complete multi-language references added, insert our posts, make and answer questions, create thematic or geographical networks add our last posts of twitter, we could find a social media made for professionals.

LinkedIn was set up in less than 10 years ago and released in 2003. For the year 2009 exceeded 50 million users, and in 2011 it has multiplied by 2, with a ratio of one new user per second. So, it’s very interesting to add it in our Digital Marketing Plan.

Among the extraordinary events of this network we can find:

1) LinkedIn added a new tool for creating a graphic system to see the links called InMap.

2) 44% of the users are from outside the United States of America.

3) The quickest growing areas are Brazil, Mexico, India and France.

4) The dominant sector is the services one.

5) In Europe it ranks very well in Alexa.

Now, the only question is to know if LinkedIn has succeeded also in specific countries, like Western european ones, that often are so different from American behaviour.

If we take a look into Alexa, we will see that LinkedIn rates are in the Alexa #Top 20 in countries like UK, Spain or Luxembourg.

The inclination of LinkedIn is to establish itself as the best social network in the domain of business. By the way, we have to advertise that in some nations of Europe (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) there is another network quite similar, called Xing, who has got important ranks in Alexa.

Xing defines itself as “A social software platform providing a small-world network for professionals” and it ranks #15 in Germany, #22 in Austria and #37 in Switzerland.

Abel Pardo is CEO of Aigen Digital Marketing and Professor of Marketing Digital and creacion de paginas web at the Universidad de Leon