LinkedIn has acquired one million users in Singapore, or 20 percent of its 5 million population, since the service’s launch there in 2011, the professional networking site announced today. This milestone means that about 70 percent of Singapore’s labor force and students now have accounts on the Web site, according to the company.
Singapore is the home of the company’s Asia-Pacific HQ and its fourth market in Southeast Asia to surpass the one million milestone, after Malaysia (about one million), Indonesia and the Philippines (1.5 million each). Other Asia Pacific countries with more than one million LinkedIn members are Australia (4 million), India (19 million) and China (3 million).
The site’s rapid growth in Singapore is not surprising because the country is an important business and financial hub. Its expanding user base in the rest of Southeast Asia also underscores that region’s potential as an emerging market for tech and online services. Indonesia in particular sees high usage of social networking services–according to research from Brand24.co.id, Indonesians contribute 2.4 percent of tweets, while Jakarta ranked second in terms of the world’s top cities on Facebook. According to Mary Meeker, Indonesia saw a 58 percent increase in Internet users in 2012, superseded by only China and India.
The top five industries represented among LinkedIn’s Singaporean members are IT, banking, financial services, oil and energy, and education management, while the top five international companies followed are Standard Chartered Bank, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Solutions for Emerging Asia, and IBM.
LinkedIn says that globally it attracts more than two new members every second and has more than 200 million members worldwide.