LinkedIn has recently published and Infographic on it’s Middle East users. According to LinkedIn, the Middle East audience is young 
and highly educated, with 73% having earned a university degree or higher, and they have succeeded in translating their education into positions of real authority within business. More than half (52%) are responsible for deciding which products or vendors their company should use. A third of them use LinkedIn to research such choices.
It is estimated that there are 5.8 million LinkedIn users in the Middle East. LinkedIn users in the Middle East grew by 123 percent between October 2011 and October 2012, with the current population in the Middle East representing 3.8 percent of total LinkedIn members.
LinkedIn members in the Middle East pursue international experience with one in five taking over eight overseas business trips, and three quarters stressing the value of having a global perspective on events. Increasingly, it is LinkedIn that they turn to, to provide this perspective: 46% say they have increased their usage of LinkedIn in the past 12 months and 44% say that they are now much more engaged with the platform. Industry news and insight is the first form of content they seek out on LinkedIn.
The Middle East audience shows an appetite for signalling success through personal spending: 45% wear designer clothes, 28% intend to buy a designer watch and 32% are actively looking at property purchases; when it comes to technology, 81% own a smartphone, with 59% carrying a tablet. And as with business decisions, LinkedIn is an increasingly valued source of guidance for such purchases: new product information ranks behind only industry news and career opportunities as the most popular form of content on the platform.
Emirates Airlines, Etisalat, SABIC, STC and Saudi Aramco are the companies most represented on LinkedIn in the region
Source:
