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Breaking into Japan? Start with Facebook, not LinkedIn

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    • In many countries, outreach, prospecting and even pitching can be done cold, digitally and at scale. But that’s rarely the case in Japan, where relationships lead the technology, not the other way around.
    • In many countries, outreach, prospecting and even pitching can be done cold, digitally and at scale. But that’s rarely the case in Japan, where relationships lead the technology, not the other way around. PHOTO: AFP

    Paul Ashton

    Published Sat, Jul 12, 2025 · 07:55 AM

    [SINGAPORE] If you’re planning to grow a business in Japan and you’re betting on LinkedIn, you might want to take a beat. Despite what global playbooks tell you, LinkedIn is still a niche platform in Japan.

    The numbers paint a stark picture: LinkedIn has roughly five million users in a country of over 125 million people – that’s just 4 per cent of the total population. A bit of quick and dirty arithmetic shows that even among Japan’s 16 to 65-year-olds, which consists of around 70 million people, LinkedIn only has a market penetration of 7 per cent.

    In comparison, LinkedIn has 260 million users in the US and nearly 350 million across Asia-Pacific. If Japan looks like an outlier here, that’s because it is.

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