If you are a member of the business focused social networking site LinkedIn there is a strong probability that you have a high level of personal income, according to a new study from Anderson Analytics.
The study found a direct relationship between the number of connections and high personal income. Those members with personal incomes between $200K-$350K were seven times more likely than others to have over 150 connections.
The survey found that senior executives, who make up about 8.4 million members, have the highest average personal income with $104,000. Savvy networkers, also described as consultants have the second highest averaged income with $93,500 and consist of 9 million LinkedIn members.
Those who fell into the category of late adopters with titles such as teacher, medical profession, lawyer and accountant have lower personal income with $88,000 and make up about 6.6 million members.
Casual members of LinkedIn were found to have the lowest personal incomes averaging $87,500 and accounting for 6.1 million members.
“I strongly believe marketers need to go to where consumers are in order to listen to and observe them. In this day and age, it’s unrealistic to expect them to come to you and answer your specific questions,” said Tom H. C. Anderson, Anderson Analytics founder and managing partner.
“While we’ve done a lot of work with data sources other than surveys such as text mining emails and call center logs, screen scraping online discussion boards and other websites, Social Networks like LinkedIn are fascinating, and we will be doing a lot more to understand and leverage them in the near future”.
Other interesting findings include 66 percent of members are classified as decision makers or have influence in purchase decisions at their companies. They also tend to be more senior (56% are “individual contributors,” 16% are management level, and 28% are director/VP level or above).
