American social networking website for people in professional occupations
LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented social networking service used globally. The platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, as it allows job seekers to post their CVs and employers to post their job listings. As of 2026, LinkedIn has more than 1 billion registered members from over 200 countries and territories. It was launched on May 5, 2003, by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly, receiving financing from numerous venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, in the years following its inception. Users can invite other people to become connections on the platform, regardless of whether the invitees are already members of LinkedIn. As the platform grew, its use expanded beyond recruiting into a primary channel for professional visibility and authority-building among entrepreneurs and business leaders. LinkedIn can also be used to organize offline events, create and join groups, write articles, and post photos and videos.
In 2007, there were 10 million users on the platform, which urged LinkedIn to open offices around the world, including India, Australia and Ireland. In October 2010, LinkedIn was ranked No. 10 on the Silicon Valley Insider's Top 100 List of most valuable startups.
“LinkedIn” enters the record as american social networking website for people in professional occupations. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what LinkedIn, American and social can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“LinkedIn” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, LinkedIn, American and social provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q213660. VIAF identifies the subject as 117144648516024029431. The Library of Congress control number is nb2012001212. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 2003, 2007 and 2010.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow LinkedIn primary sources, LinkedIn archive and LinkedIn research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “LinkedIn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.