LinkedIn Industries List, Rankings and Statistics [October 2019]

Are you sure you're focusing the right sales niche on LinkedIn?

Choosing the right LinkedIn Industry can be crucial for your sales and networking, finding the new connections, building meaningful relationships and acquiring a new customer on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has exactly 148 industries inside the platform. Choosing the right one can sometimes be very difficult.

If you choose the LinkedIn industry where there are no too many people, you can end up with a smaller, but more meaningful connection circle and easily add on the top of your sales.

On the other hand, if you choose the big LinkedIn industry, there are more people that can be the right fit for you and your company, but there is also much more noise and more competitors.

In this article, we’re going to see the newest LinkedIn industries benchmark and statistics that will help you to find the best LinkedIn industries where you should put your efforts while doing sales and networking on LinkedIn.

Also, we’re going to see the LinkedIn industries list with the exact number of people inside them.

So, let’s dive right into the data :)

LinkedIn Industries Benchmark and Statistics

In 2016, Joshua Waldman did really great research on the LinkedIn Industries rankings. But, it has been more than 3 years since than, and LinkedIn got 100M+ of new users.

So things are changed. Here’s how it looked 3 years ago:

As we can see, the top industry on LinkedIn was Information Technology and Services with amazing 10.9% of all LinkedIn users followed by Marketing and Advertising and Human resources with 8.9% and 3.9%.

Honestly, this is what everyone expected. But right now, the things are different.

You’re going to be surprised when you see the new benchmark.

Currently, LinkedIn has 575M+ users while more than 260 million of them are active on a monthly basis.

We carefully researched every LinkedIn industry and collected the number of all users inside them.

Here’s how the new benchmark looks like:

As you can see, Information Technology and Services still holds first place with 4.9% of all LinkedIn users.

Surprisingly, the second and third place are Hospital & Health Care LinkedIn Industry (with 3.7 % of people), and Construction industry (with 3.6% of people).

On the other hand, Marketing & Advertising and Human Resources are on the 11th and 25th place of the most popular LinkedIn Industries.

Keeping all of this in mind, here’s the LinkedIn industries list of the 10 most industries:

Information Technology and Services
Hospital & Health Care
Construction
Education Management
Retail
Financial Services
Accounting
Computer Software
Automotive
Higher Education

On the other hand, here’re the 10 LinkedIn industries with the lowest number of people:

Legislative Office
Nanotechnology
Alternative Dispute Resolution
Railroad Manufacture
Tobacco
Fund-Raising
Fishery
Political Organization
Think Thanks
Shipbuilding

When we take the look at the Joshuas findings from 2016, we will see that 6 LinkedIn industries that were one of the most popular industries 3 years ago are not in the top 10 list of LinkedIn Industries right now.

This includes Marketing & Advertising, Human Resources, Staffing and Recruiting, Internet, Management Consulting and Telecommunications.

Based on this, we can conclude that:

LinkedIn is officially not just used for recruiting and human resources. It grew into the world’s most popular social media network of LinkedIn professionals. Even more, it looks like LinkedIn is not the primary source of HR professionals anymore.
Marketing, advertising and consulting jobs became less popular in the last 3 years.
On the other hand, the LinkedIn network is now more focused on bringing new solutions in the Hospital & Health Care and education industries than ever before.

The most important things we can conclude is that LinkedIn is not only the place for job openings and recruiting new people.

Right now, LinkedIn is the place where the business professionals from different LinkedIn industries are gathering and providing a value between each other.

In order to become influential in your LinkedIn industry, you need to know how to post on LinkedIn and make an outstanding LinkedIn Profile.

But, before you do that, let’s see the final LinkedIn industries list with the exact number of people in each LinkedIn industry.