Breaking into Japan? Start with Facebook, not LinkedIn

[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.