Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in fall 2022, the Twitter replacement market has grown with competing candidates, ranging from small startups to open source apps to well-funded efforts like Instagram's Threads. It is saturated. But an overlooked Twitter/X alternative is growing up before our eyes. That's LinkedIn. As of March, LinkedIn's web traffic was up 10.6% year over year, while X's web traffic was down 15.2%, according to traffic analysis data from digital intelligence platform SimilarWeb.
Compared to November 2022, right after Musk took over Twitter, X's web traffic was down 10%, but LinkedIn's traffic was up 18%.
In March, Twitter/X had 727.6 million unique visitors worldwide (deduplicated), down 7.5% year over year. LinkedIn's total was much lower at 269.2 million, but that number was up 11.1% year over year, SimilarWeb said.
Additionally, the company found that LinkedIn's global Android app usage increased by 14% from November 2022 to March 2022, while X's usage decreased by 20%.
However, another source of app data, Appfigures, does not show similar trends across mobile. According to the data, LinkedIn's monthly downloads increased by 10% year over year, while X's downloads decreased by 24%. But Appfigures attributes this decline to Twitter's rebranding to X, rather than other consumer actions. The average number of downloads on LinkedIn has been consistent before and after Musk's takeover of Twitter, the company said.
Still, given that people work from desktops and laptops during the day, it's possible that some business professionals have shifted some of their web usage to LinkedIn as a result of Twitter's migration. Of course it has sex.
With the addition of features such as games (released today) and short-form videos to LinkedIn, the social network's owner, Microsoft, is increasing the number of users who previously networked through Twitter, especially the younger Gen Z crowd.
The strategy seems to be working. As Appfigures also points out, LinkedIn's mobile app generates more revenue on both iOS and Android than X and Snapchat combined.
This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, considering LinkedIn subscriptions start at $29.99 per month and go up to $69.99 per month in the app store. Monthly subscriptions for X range from $4 to $22, but users can also pay for a more expensive annual subscription. Snapchat Plus, on the other hand, costs just $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year.
Image credit: Appfigures
In other words, LinkedIn doesn't need to sell as many subscriptions to make money and has never had a hard time competing with X or Snapchat on mobile.
However, Appfigures points out that LinkedIn's mobile app revenue is rapidly increasing from $20 million in Q1 2021 to $91 million in Q1 2023. As of Q1 2024, app revenue reached $119 million, the largest quarter ever.
By comparison, X and Snapchat's first quarter revenue was $23 million and $67 million, respectively, for a total of $90 million, lower than LinkedIn.