43% of all LinkedIn users are in the US, IBM is the company with the most followers

Zoomsphere, a site which provides statistics on major social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Google+, has just revealed some interesting information and statistics on LinkedIn users.

It’s not surprising to find that the US has the most registered users on LinkedIn, with well over 61 million to its name. India comes in a distant second with over 14 million registered users. The US and India are joined in the top 10 by the UK, Brazil, Canada, France, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Spain.

Far more interesting, in the revealed statistics, is which companies have the most followers on the professional social media site. In the US, IBM comes in at the top of the list with over 580,000 followers.

In comparison, IBM only has just over 13,000 followers on its main Twitter account and 93,000 fans on Facebook. It is worth mentioning that the number of IBM employees on LinkedIn currently sits at over 280,000, Next in line on LinkedIn, in order of follower count are HP, Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Apple comes in at 7th place with only 251,000 followers.

Clearly, just as the nature of interactions on each social network differs, users follow a company on Twitter or Facebook for vastly different reasons than following a company on LinkedIn.

The most followed company does change by region, with Unilever topping the list in the UK, Research in Motion in Canada, Huawei in China, and Ferrari in Italy.

Despite the fact that the majority of the most followed companies are IT-related, the most common industry on LinkedIn is Higher Education, followed by Information Technology and Services, with Financial Services coming in third.

More than half of the companies list on LinkedIn have over 10,000 employees, with the number of companies decreasing as the number of employees decrease.

Worldwide, LinkedIn has over 143 million registered users, 43% of which are in the US.

In almost all countries, there are more men registered on LinkedIn than women, with the exception of a few countries, mostly in Asia and Eastern Europe, including China, the Philippines, Romania, Finland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Serbia and Jamaica, where female users outnumber their male counterparts, if even by a little.

We recently took a look at LinkedIn’s growth in Indonesia, where it now has over 1 million registered users, and is growing at a rate faster than Facebook. According to LinkedIn itself, we can expect far more insights into the professional world through the social network’s data in the coming months.