One of my readers took issue with a statement I made in the Microsoft article that discusses LinkedIn.
He questioned when I wrote that secretaries didn’t use LinkedIn, but executives do.
My first reaction was to suggest that I was offering a sound-bite, but as I got into the numbers to see for myself, I found some very interesting evidence for the statement…
Secretaries using LinkedIn
So using search strings in titles, I found
- 107,204 – “secretary”
- 107,043 – “administrative assistant”
- 670 – “virtual assistant”
This certainly means that “some” secretaries are using the system.
Executives using LinkedIn
But more importantly, I find:
- 1,630,394 – “president”
- 1,372,580 – “executive”
- 49,970 + 2,625, + 310 – “chairman” / “chairperson” / “chairwoman”
And with another search showing only 192,814 match both president and executive, that makes more than 2.8 million president, executive, or both. (And yes, the search would find presidents as well as vice presidents, but they both qualify as executives don’t they?)
I also found 3,040,087 with “director” – but this can include many other variations on that theme, so I’ll leave it out – there’s only 3 million of them…
An in-between category of “executive assistant” gets 108,295 matches, but I’m not sure what to do with it;-)
I’m also not certain how the data flows between in and out of network connections with the new search so I should mention here that my network includes 5+ million of the 30+ million users on the system.
Secretaries aren’t on LinkedIn, Executives are!
Executives appear to account for nearly 10% of the LinkedIn population – secretaries, less than 1%…
So – by a factor of more than ten to one, yes – executives use LinkedIn, secretaries do not!
My excitement is that I intuitively “knew” this before – but with some prodding and an enhancement of the LinkedIn search engine, I (and now all of you;-) can say it definitively!
And isn’t that another good reason that you should be on LinkedIn?
To your continued success,
steve
(And I’m not saying secretaries can’t or shouldn’t join LinkedIn, but that they don’t – here – I’ll go further – they should, but haven’t yet!-)
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
Some of us that might fall under your definition of ‘secretary’ also fall under the definition of ‘executive’. I own my virtual assistance business, thus I’m both the CEO of my company and a virtual assistant.
Tina,
You are absolutely correct, and I’ll give you another title – Entrepreneur.
To take what you do and run with it on your own puts you in another category of people on the system – and another well represented category I might add. (Sure – now I’m going to have to come up with some way of finding out how many entrepreneurs are on the system;-)
Thanks for the comment!
steve
the in word for a sales person is account executive. i’ve read that at the big banks they would call a lot of people VP’s when dealing with clients just to make the clients feel important when in reality the person was not a real executive
Interesting slant on that Alen. Good thing presidents outnumbered executives;-)
And yes – sales people do use LinkedIn. I believe for the reason this article highlights – because it’s where top people can be found. And more importantly, introductions can be made to those top people from trusted contacts.
steve