Professional networking site LinkedIn grew its number of users in India by nearly 30% in less than a year making India its second largest user base worldwide.
LinkedIn announced on its blog that they crossed 200 million users worldwide. The United States, with 74 million users contributed to the largest number of LinkedIn users followed by India, where it has 18 million users.
In April, the company had about 14 million users in India which implies a growth of nearly 30% in about 8 months.
Earlier this week, the company promoted its India manager Hari V Krishnan to head its operations in Asia Pacific and Japan and appointed Nishant K Rao as its new country manager.
For the US listed company, India with over 80 million white collar professionals is quite obviously an important market. Linkedin is growing fast on the mobile in China, Brazil, Portugal, India and Italy and the company opened its first development center outside US in Bangalore, India.
Emerging countries like India, China, Brazil, and Russia are large markets for most aspiring global companies. However, for web companies, China and Russia are tough markets to crack. China, dominated by companies like the Alibaba Group and Baidu remains a challenge to web companies due to various factors such as language and regulation. Russia poses similar challenges.
India, however, is an easier place to tap users because of its largely English speaking Internet population. The country, with over 120 million Internet users, is one of the largest Internet populations in the world.
Twitter, which has over 500 million users, has more than 18 million users from India, making it the 6th largest user base for Twitter. For Facebook, India is the third largest user base with over 60 million users from the subcontinent.
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