In yesterday’s post I referred to LinkedIn as part social network, part jobs site. Facebook is the fifth largest site in its upstream clickstream, and last year Sandra wrote about the connections between the two websites. However, LinkedIn has a different user profile to your average social network. It over represents with two key Mosaic lifestyle groups: Group A – Symbols of Success (people with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products) and Group E – Urban Intelligence (young, single and mostly well-educated, these people are cosmopolitan in tastes and liberal in attitudes).
Both groups contain the sort of people that are in demand, both as consumers and employees. So it’s interesting to see how LinkedIn’s user profile swings against the average for both our Social Networking and Forums and Employment and Training categories in the charts below.

LinkedIn is therefore both an up-market social network and an up-market job site – last week 3.2% of its downstream traffic went to Employment and Training sites. The site is becoming more and more important to the recruitment industry: it still doesn’t send a huge amount of traffic their way, but the traffic that it does send is high quality and, as the chart below illustrates, on the increase.