LinkedIn is Microsoft's professional social network: a profile that works as a public CV, a network of connections and a feed where people post about work. Using it well means deciding first what you need it for (finding a job, getting known by potential clients, putting a face on your company) and then doing a few things consistently, instead of trying all of them. It's one of the ways a company can increase its online presence, not the only one.
Guides on how to use LinkedIn nearly all explain the same steps: photo, headline, connections, groups. What's missing is the numbers. How many people in the UK are really on it, what they search for when they look up LinkedIn on Google, which formats get the most engagement, and what has changed since the platform started using members' content to train its AI. You'll find all of them here, with sources, along with how we use it for sales.
How many people in the UK are really on LinkedIn
According to DataReportal's Digital 2026: United Kingdom report, at the end of 2025 LinkedIn had 48.0 million members in the UK, 68.9% of the population and 86.8% of adults. That's 5 million more than a year earlier (+11.6%). The advertising audience is 45.5% women and 54.5% men.
Put next to an ONS figure, that number means something different. In June 2026 there were 34.48 million people in employment in the UK. So LinkedIn has around 13.5 million more UK members than there are people in work. It isn't a mistake: DataReportal itself warns that LinkedIn reports registered members, not monthly active users like other social networks, so the figures can't be compared. Those 48 million include students, retired people, profiles opened years ago and never touched again, and duplicate accounts.
In practice, the size of the platform tells you little about how many people will see what you post. What counts is your network, and how much of that network actually opens the app. Worldwide, according to LinkedIn's official figures, there are 1.3 billion members, and every minute more than 18,000 connections are made and about 8,200 job applications are sent.
What people in the UK search for when they look up LinkedIn on Google
To see where people get stuck with the platform, we pulled average monthly search volumes on Google UK from DataForSEO (Google Ads data, United Kingdom, September 2025 to August 2026) for the most common questions about LinkedIn, and grouped them by goal.
| Group | Search | Average searches per month |
|---|---|---|
| Understanding and getting started | how to use linkedin | 480 |
| how does linkedin work | 390 | |
| how to create a linkedin profile | 140 | |
| how to join linkedin | 110 | |
| how to make a linkedin profile | 70 | |
| Group total | 1,190 | |
| Looking for work | how to add cv to linkedin | 1,000 |
| how to upload cv to linkedin | 880 | |
| how to remove open to work on linkedin | 720 | |
| how to add open to work on linkedin | 140 | |
| how to find jobs on linkedin | 110 | |
| Group total | 2,850 | |
| Business | linkedin business page | 1,300 |
| create linkedin business page | 590 | |
| linkedin for business | 390 | |
| Group total | 2,280 | |
| Leaving | how to delete linkedin account | 3,600 |
| how to cancel linkedin premium | 2,400 | |
| delete linkedin account | 1,600 | |
| how to delete linkedin profile | 480 | |
| Group total | 8,080 |
Three things stand out. First: added together, searches on how to leave LinkedIn or stop paying for it (8,080 a month) are almost seven times those on how to start using it (1,190). Second: people searching how to remove the Open to Work badge (720) outnumber those searching how to add it (140) by five to one. The third is about commercial value: according to the Google Ads estimates reported by DataForSEO, a click on "linkedin for business" costs advertisers £13.41 on average, one on "how does linkedin work" £3.09, about four times less (CPCs converted from US dollars at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026, $1.3226 to the pound). A cost that high means advertisers expect to sell something to people searching for the business side.
The exit searches are also steady all year. "How to delete linkedin account" moves between 2,900 and 4,400 searches a month, with the highest months in September and October 2025 and January 2026, and "how to cancel linkedin premium" stays at 2,400 in eleven months out of twelve. You can't work out the cause from search volume, so we leave it as a figure and nothing more.
Before you open the app: decide what you need it for
Many of the problems we see in B2B company profiles start here. A profile that tries to speak to recruiters, clients and colleagues at once speaks to nobody. Pick one main goal and build the rest around it.
| Goal | What to do first | What to measure |
|---|---|---|
| Finding a job | Headline with the role you want, experience with results, Open to Work visible to recruiters only if you're still employed | Messages from recruiters, replies to applications |
| Getting known by potential clients | Headline that says who you work for and what problem you solve, Featured section with a real case | Profile views from people in your target market, connection requests received |
| Raising the company's profile | A complete company page, but above all well-kept profiles for key employees | Engagement on posts, website visits from LinkedIn |
The profile: the parts people actually read
Your profile is the page that opens when someone looks you up after a phone call, an email or a meeting. In the sales sequences we use, that's exactly what LinkedIn is for: putting a face to the person who has just written or called. These are the parts worth looking after, in the order people see them:
- Photo and cover image. A recent photo, your face recognisable, a plain background. The cover image is the most underrated space: it can say in one line what you do, or show the product.
- Headline. It's the line under your name and the part that shows in search results, comments and connection requests. "Sales Manager" says little; "I help machinery manufacturers sell abroad" says who you're useful to.
- About. First person, short sentences, one real example of work you've done. The first lines are the ones people see without clicking "see more".
- Featured. A case study, an article, a presentation. It's the only section where you can put a link without it looking like a promotional post.
- Experience. For each role, a measurable result, not a list of duties.
- Skills and custom URL. Skills feed recruiters' internal search; a clean URL (linkedin.com/in/firstname-lastname) helps when you put it in your email signature or on your website.
If you also care about how your profile appears on Google and in answers from ChatGPT or Gemini, we ran a dedicated test in our guide to LinkedIn SEO; to measure how often your brand appears in AI assistants, see our guide to AI visibility.
Your network: who to add and what to write in the request
A useful network isn't the biggest one, it's the one made of people who could hire you, buy from you or introduce you to someone who will. Start with colleagues, former colleagues, clients and suppliers: people who already know you accept, and LinkedIn uses those connections to suggest people close to them. Then come the respected voices in your sector to follow and comment on: we explain how to find them in our guide on how to identify industry influencers.
For people who don't know you, the note in the request makes the difference. In the sales sequences we use at Visilay the note always mentions a detail that can be checked: a post the person wrote, something seen on the company's website, the sector they work in. No pitch in the first message. One example we use, with the details in brackets to replace: "Hello [name], I was looking at the [company] website while researching the sector and [specific detail] caught my eye. Sending you a connection request."
What doesn't work is the opposite: a request with no note followed, as soon as it's accepted, by a long message presenting the company. People who receive it learn to spot it by the second line.
Posting: which formats get the most engagement
The broadest data available on formats is Socialinsider's LinkedIn Benchmarks 2026 study, which analysed 1.3 million posts published by 16,645 company pages between January 2024 and December 2025. It covers company pages, not personal profiles, and measures the average engagement rate by format.
| Format | Engagement rate 2024 | Engagement rate 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Document (swipeable PDF) | 6.10% | 7.00% | +14% |
| Multiple images | 6.60% | 6.45% | -2.3% |
| Video | 5.60% | 6.00% | +7% |
| Single image | 4.85% | 5.30% | +9% |
| Text only | 4.00% | 4.50% | +12% |
| Poll | 4.40% | 4.20% | -4.5% |
| External link | 3.30% | 3.25% | -1.5% |
Two practical points. The swipeable document is the best-performing format (according to Socialinsider because it invites people to stop and flick through the pages): it's the best way to turn a sales deck or a case study into a piece of content. The post with an external link comes last: if you need to send traffic to your website, write the content in full in the post and add the link later, or put it in the Featured section.
Video's engagement rate is rising but, in the same study, average video views fell by 36% in a year. Pages are posting more videos (2 to 4 a month on average) and each one is seen by fewer people. To choose a type of content more generally, our guide to types of content compares formats beyond LinkedIn too.
Personal profile or company page?
You need both, but not in the same way. The company page is where people check that the business exists, see how many employees it has and read the job ads. Relationships, on the other hand, go through personal profiles: people connect with people.
We've seen it outside LinkedIn too. In our test of 27 Italian B2B searches, a LinkedIn result appeared on Google's first page for 12 of them. Of the 15 URLs we found, 8 were Pulse articles, meaning long-form articles written by individuals, and only one was a company page. The AI side of the question, how to get your brand named by ChatGPT and Gemini, is covered in our guide to citations in AI engines.
For a small business the practical choice is this: a complete, up-to-date company page with only a few posts, and most of the effort going into the owner's and the salespeople's profiles. It's also the principle behind B2B lead generation strategies, where LinkedIn is one channel and not the only one.
Using LinkedIn to find a job
If you're looking for work, there are three features to use: the Jobs section with job alerts, your CV uploaded in your application preferences, and the Open to Work setting. The latest figure LinkedIn has published on the last one dates from 2020 and comes from the platform's own internal data: turning on Open to Work doubles your chances of getting a message from a recruiter, and people showing the public green frame receive on average 40% more InMails from recruiters and 20% more messages from their network. In the same article LinkedIn says that applying among the first applicants can make you up to four times more likely to hear back.
Read that alongside the table above: in the UK five times as many people search how to remove the frame as search how to add it. Your current employer can see the public frame too. If you're still employed, use the option that shows your availability to recruiters only: the doubling of messages LinkedIn measured refers to turning on Open to Work, not to the frame.
Using LinkedIn to sell without spamming
In B2B, LinkedIn works better as part of a sequence than as a channel on its own. The outbound sequence we use at Visilay runs over six working days and has 14 steps: 5 on LinkedIn (the connection request with a note and four short messages), 4 emails and 4 phone calls, plus a final step where we decide whether to close the contact or move on to another person at the same company. LinkedIn opens the door and puts a face to the person calling; the call and the email carry the proposal.
| Day | Phone call | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Connection request with a personalised note | Personalised manual email | - |
| 2 | Message | Yes | |
| 3 | Message | Yes | |
| 4 | Message | - | Yes |
| 5 | Message | Yes | |
| 6 | - | - | Close or new contact at the company |
Two rules we stick to: the first message never contains an offer, and every follow-up adds something useful for the person receiving it (a figure about their sector, a comparison with a competitor) instead of asking "did you see my message?". List-building tools such as Sales Navigator help you find the right people; lead generation software is something you choose after deciding the process, not before.
If you want to set up this kind of work on LinkedIn with paid campaigns, profile management and content, that's what we do in our LinkedIn service for B2B companies; if your goal is broader, start from the page on lead generation.
Privacy: your posts and AI training
Since 3 November 2025 LinkedIn has used the public content of adult members in the UK, the EU, the EEA and Switzerland to train its generative AI systems: posts, comments, captions, photos, job ads and activity in groups. In the UK this came a year after a pause: in September 2024 LinkedIn had stopped training on UK members' data after talks with the Information Commissioner's Office. On the cut-off date, Italy's data protection authority, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, explained on 28 October 2025 that members who objected before 3 November also protected content already published, while those who object afterwards protect only what they post from then on.
You don't need to delete your account to object: just turn off the Data for Generative AI Improvement setting under Data privacy in your profile settings. People who aren't members but appear in content posted by others can also exercise the right to object. The Garante added that it was checking with the other European authorities whether the mechanism complies with the GDPR.
If you really do want to close your profile, the option is in your account preferences, under account management. Download an archive of your data first, connections included, from the Data privacy section of your settings.
The mistakes we see most often
- A headline with just the job title and company name, which doesn't say who you're useful to.
- Accepting every request: your network fills up with salespeople and the feed becomes unusable.
- Posting in a burst for two weeks and then disappearing for six months. One post every two weeks for a year is better.
- Using the company page as the only channel and leaving the salespeople's profiles empty.
- Replying to comments days later: the conversation under a post is the part people see most.
Frequently asked questions about how to use LinkedIn
It depends on your settings. By default, anyone who views a profile appears in the "Who viewed your profile" list of the person they viewed. You can switch to private mode in your visibility settings: you then show up as an anonymous member, but on a basic account you also lose the ability to see who has viewed yours.
Yes, for all the basic features: profile, connections, messages to connections, posting and job applications. Premium, Sales Navigator for selling and Recruiter for hiring are paid subscriptions.
LinkedIn had 48.0 million members in the UK at the end of 2025 according to DataReportal, but that is the number of registered profiles, not active users. It is well above the number of people in employment in the UK recorded by the ONS for June 2026, 34.48 million, so it includes many inactive profiles.
It depends on your goal. Keeping a useful profile takes a few minutes a week to accept requests and reply to messages. Getting known by potential clients takes regular posting, even once every two weeks, and time to comment on posts by people in your target market.
From a personal profile, if the goal is building relationships and sales contacts. The company page is for credibility, job ads and paid campaigns; in our test on Google, the LinkedIn content on page one was almost always written by individuals.
Yes. Turn off the Data for Generative AI Improvement setting under Data privacy in your settings. Since 3 November 2025 this applies to members in the UK as well as the EU, the EEA and Switzerland, and an objection made after that date covers only content posted from then on.
The profile that works is the one you can leave alone
The search table suggests that for many people in the UK LinkedIn is more of a chore than a tool: searches about leaving it are almost seven times those about starting. That happens when it's treated as a social network you have to feed every day. The more sustainable approach is the opposite: build a profile that works on its own even in the months when you post nothing, with a headline that says who you're useful to, a real case in the Featured section and a network of people you've chosen. That's the part anyone who looks you up after a phone call will always find, while posts scroll past and vanish in a few days (the same difference as between evergreen and viral content). For companies the same principle applies that we use for B2B SEO: first build what lasts, then what gets used up.
