The Belgian LinkedIn Monitor (2.0) - June 2023 Edition

We are starting the last month of the 2nd quarter and ending the 1st half of the year, I do hope your business is on par with your goals, objectives, and quotas.?If not, take the upcoming summer to prepare for a dynamite Q3 and Q4.

But with another month gone, it is time to update the Belgian LinkedIn Monitor which I have run now for 4 years.

The Belgian LinkedIn landscape

Worldwide LinkedIn has surpassed the 930M mark and in Belgium, we have passed the 4.3M point.?We are right on track to reach 1 billion members by the beginning of 2024.

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About a year ago, by popular request, I also split the member base into the 3 regions. ?Time for an update.?However, we have to keep in mind that some people added their Home Town while others their Work Town which will skew the results.

We should also overlay the language distribution in order to draw some conclusions.?Here too we need to be careful because a large group of LinkedIn members only have an English language profile. This was determined at the time they created their profile -?If they used the English interface, LinkedIn concludes their default profile is English even if all the text is in Dutch.?It's a given that most of the English profiles belong to Flemish-speaking people not to say that there are French-speaking people who are in the English category.

The Flemish LinkedIn community continues to be bigger than the French community (even if you include the Brussels Region which could be considered mostly French).

In terms of age distribution, men (52%) outrank women (40%) by a lot and the gender-neutral group stands now at 8%,. So the gender balance seems to be in line with the population balance.

Belgians and their activity

The activity levels of both job changes and posting volume are up from the previous month.?With an overall 4.39% posters and 1.49% job changers, we are seeing a small decrease over the last months.

For the 2nd month in a?row, we see a decrease in posters on LinkedIn.?Let’s hope that we can break this downward trend in June 2023.

By popular request, I have drilled down into the activity level by region.?It was suggested that the Flemish community was more active than the French Community but the below chart is somewhat contradicting this.

It makes sense that the Brussels Region is the most active. Why??Again, I will come back to the Location Field argument that I made above which is that the location is not necessarily consistent (Home or Work) for every LinkedIn member.

Belgians and Jobs

Looking at the job market in Belgium, We can see that there are more and more job openings on every job board in Belgium except for LinkedIn.

The number of open jobs on LinkedIn has dropped again to under 75.000 Jobs

With around 73.000 open jobs, we see a continued drop in the last 6 months.?The increase in other job boards can be explained by an increase in local “blue collar” jobs (hotel, restaurant, cleaning, etc.).?

Now that being said, we do see a small decrease in Belgians that changed jobs in the last 90 days.?As indicated the number is 1.49%!?

Looking at the evolution we see that there is a downward spiral here too.

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And here too, I have drilled down by region with the following results

Most job changes are happening in the Flanders region which again seems no surprise, the most open jobs are in the Flemish part of the country.

More statistics are available upon request.

The Belgian Advertising Monitor

Here I have now tracked 16 quarters of ad costs since 2020.

The conclusion is that ad costs have been raised by 2% compared to the previous month in all categories and all areas.

·?????The CPM is now set between 26€-31€ for 1000 impressions in all test groups

·?????The CPC cost lies now between 6.50€ and 7.50€ per click

·?????Finally, the competitive cost for job posts now is somewhere between 25€/30€ per day

We have to keep in mind that 1 out of every 4 posts is a Sponsored Content post, so the competition for visibility increases.?We are seeing LinkedIn getting more revenue from Ads as companies?are willing to pay for this visibility.

I have taken a few simple scenarios to illustrate the evolution of the cost

If you are interested in more numbers or a more specific target group, do not hesitate to reach out to me.?Also, if you want to consult on your LinkedIn advertising, I am more than happy to help you!

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What is new on LinkedIn last month?

The whirlwind of new features continues and so does the waiting to get access to some.?Here are something I got access to and for which I am waiting.

?Here are 4 new features I got access to in the last month

1. The ability to set your Home feed to display Top or Recent posts by default

2. You can now better set the visibility of your profile image

3. If and when you schedule posts, you will get a notification that your post has been posted and is live.

4. Finally, Your activity now includes some extra views by content type

Over the course of the month some other features were announced that I am looking forward to:

1. Draft using AI feature when creating a post which is currently in Beta. This feature is the next step in LinkedIn to suggest content you could create. (Source: Kevin D. Turner )

2. As a content you will get access to conversations happening. This will be part of the Content Creator tool menu. (Source: Deanna Russo )

3. Ideas for the next posts will also be found in the area of your content creator tools.?(Source: Gillian Whitney & Kevin D. Turner )

Final words

Any suggestions about improvements or other numbers you want me to include, please do mention them in the comments.