LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 810 million members worldwide. With such a large user base, LinkedIn offers a wealth of demographic data that can provide valuable insights for businesses, marketers, and recruiters. In this comprehensive guide, we will examine the various ways to extract demographic data from LinkedIn to help you better understand your target audience.
LinkedIn’s Audience Insights Tool
The easiest way to get access to LinkedIn demographic data is through their Audience Insights tool. This tool is available to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions customers and provides detailed analytics on LinkedIn members based on criteria like location, job title, company size, industry, age, and gender. With Audience Insights, you can analyze an audience of up to 15 million members to inform your marketing and recruiting strategy. Some of the key demographic data points available include:
- Age
- Gender
- Job title
- Job function
- Company name
- Company size
- Company industry
- Location
- Education level
- Field of study
Audience Insights is a powerful tool for understanding who your target audience is on LinkedIn. The detailed filters allow you to zero in on the exact demographic segments you want to reach. As a premium tool, Audience Insights provides more robust information than LinkedIn’s free demographic data.
LinkedIn Ad Targeting
Another way to access LinkedIn demographic data is through LinkedIn’s self-serve ad platform. When you set up a LinkedIn ad campaign, you can define your target audience based on demographic factors like age, gender, location, job title, and more. As you build your ad audience, LinkedIn will show you the estimated audience size and top companies your ads could reach. This gives you demographic insights even before running your ads.
Some of the demographic targeting options available with LinkedIn ads include:
- Age
- Gender
- Job title and function
- Company name and industry
- Location
- Job seniority
- Groups and interests
The more targeting options you select for your ads, the more LinkedIn will refine the potential audience size and composition for you. You get to see demographic statistics on your ad audience without having to run ads and collect data first.
LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn Recruiter is LinkedIn’s recruitment software tool that lets you source candidates based on various demographic filters. With Recruiter, you can search for prospects using criteria like location, years of experience, company, job function, and more. As you build your search query, Recruiter will show aggregate demographic statistics on the search results.
For example, you may see that your search results are 60% male and 40% female, or that over half the candidates are located in a certain metro area. This allows recruiters to analyze the demographic makeup of their talent pool before ever reaching out. Key demographic insights in Recruiter include:
- Gender
- Location
- Years of experience
- Company size
- Industry
- Job function and title
- Education
Having access to these demographic filters and data points allows recruiters to tap into rich talent pools on LinkedIn to find the best candidates.
Exporting LinkedIn Data
The most comprehensive way to analyze LinkedIn demographics is by exporting data directly from LinkedIn. Under your account settings, you can request an archive of your LinkedIn data which will be downloaded as a ZIP file containing JSON files. These files contain all the information LinkedIn has associated with your profile and network.
By exporting your profile data along with your 1st degree network, you can get demographic insights on your connections such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Employer
- Job title and function
- Skills
- Education
You’ll need to do some data manipulation to extract and analyze this demographic data, but this method provides the most raw data possible from LinkedIn. Just be aware it can take up to 72 hours for LinkedIn to prepare your full archive.
Web Scraping
For developers, it is also possible to scrape LinkedIn pages for demographic data using web scraping tools like Octoparse, ParseHub, and Import.io. However, scraping LinkedIn does violate their Terms of Service so proceed with caution using this method. The steps would involve:
- Use a web scraper to extract LinkedIn profiles – starting with your own connections
- Extract fields like name, location, job title, education, skills etc
- Export the scraped data into a CSV file
- Manipulate the data in Excel or Tableau to analyze demographics like age, gender, location, job function etc
Web scraping allows you to gather LinkedIn demographic data without any restrictions, but with the risk of having your access blocked if detected. Use this method sparingly and only if the other options don’t provide sufficient data access.
Third-Party LinkedIn Data Providers
There are also third-party data providers that offer access to LinkedIn demographic data. Companies like ZoomInfo and Apollo scrape massive amounts of data from LinkedIn and other sources, then clean and structure it for clients. Other providers like ContactOut and Adapt also offer cleaned LinkedIn data for purchase.
The benefit of third-party data vendors is access to millions of LinkedIn profiles and contacts, often provided in easy-to-use dashboards and analytics tools. However, the data is not always guaranteed to be current or accurate since it is scraped. Additionally, it can be very expensive with providers charging per record. But for some companies, buying LinkedIn data in bulk from vendors makes more sense than trying to extract it themselves.
Analyzing Demographics in LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides a version of LinkedIn data that sales and marketing professionals can use to find prospects and new leads. Within Sales Navigator, the My Network tab shows you an overview of your LinkedIn network with some high-level demographic data:
- Total 1st degree connections
- Top companies your connections work for
- Top job titles and functions
- Top skills amongst your connections
- Top schools attended
While you don’t have all the demographic filtering options like in Recruiter, Sales Navigator still provides useful demographic insights on your network. You can even filter and search within My Network to analyze demographics like industry, seniority level, location, company size, and years of experience. For prospecting, the Company Pages section additionally shows employee demographics like gender, seniority, job function, and education for your target companies.
Putting LinkedIn Demographics into Action
Now that you know how to tap into LinkedIn demographic data, here are some ideas to put it into action:
Inform Marketing Strategies
Analyze your target audience demographics on LinkedIn to create more personalized marketing copy and content.
Refine Advertising Campaigns
Use LinkedIn ad targeting tools to reach precise demographics and optimize conversion rates.
Source Quality Candidates
Leverage Recruiter to attract and engage talent based on locations, skills, education and other data.
Identify New Leads
Prospect for leads within niche demographics using Sales Navigator and My Network insights.
Enrich Customer Data
Incorporate LinkedIn demographics into your existing CRM profiles for more holistic intelligence.
Monitor Company Insights
Use employee demographic data in Company Pages to analyze the talent landscape of your competitors.
Conclusion
LinkedIn provides a multitude of options to access demographic data on its 810+ million members. While LinkedIn’s paid tools like Audience Insights provide the most robust data, free options like ad targeting and exported member data can also supply valuable demographic insights. If you need bulk LinkedIn data for large-scale analysis, third-party data providers are another avenue to explore. Overall, combining LinkedIn’s depth of demographic information with the right tools and strategies can significantly boost your marketing, recruiting and lead generation efforts.
