Pinterest can’t challenge Facebook’s 1.06 billion users, but it seems to prove that you don’t need a lot of employees to get a lot of users.
Being a rising star in social media, Pinterest is expanding both in employees and in users. According to our numbers, Pinterest clearly beats both Facebook and Twitter when it comes to the number of users per employee, being the most efficient company in social media right now, at least in that respect.
Pinterest leads the way
Founded in March 2010, Pinterest is still relatively young as a company and seems to be growing by the minute. During 2012, it grew from 20 employees to 100 as its user base went up from 9 million to about 40 million. This makes it the largest social media platform in users per employee.
There are many interesting numbers behind this chart:
- With 400,000 users per employee, Pinterest has almost twice as many as the second largest company Facebook, with 249,000 users per employee.
- Pinterest also has the lowest number of users, 40 million.
- Facebook, with 1.06 billion users, is the largest social media platform.
- LinkedIn has as many users as Twitter, but while Twitter has about 900 employees, LinkedIn has 3500.
- Google+ is not in our chart since Google will not reveal how many of its employees that work specifically on Goggle+.
Instagram could be the real winner
However, Pinterest does not necessarily have to be the real winner in this efficiency race since both Tumblr and Instagram could be bigger in users per employee. Let us look at some futher numbers.
Using the numbers for Instagram from when Facebook bought them in April of 2012, it would crush the competition with its enormous 2.3 million users per employee. Unfortunately, Facebook has not released any numbers that show how many employees that are working with Instagram today.
Tumbler, on the other hand, doesn’t have any numbers of active users. It has 95.5 million blogs, but that doesn’t tell us anything about how many active users it has. Still, in blogs per employee, it has an impressive reach.
Facebook: still the top earner
Users per employee doesn’t say everything about the efficiency, of course. If you have the revenue to back it up, a large number of employees could just show that you are bigger than the other companies. This seems to be the case when it comes to Facebook. It has 4,600 employees, and the revenue to back it up, for sure.
Interesting to see is that even though Twitter “only” has 900 employees, compared to LinkedIn’s 2,400, the revenue per employee is about the same.
High in users per employee but no revenue?
According to recent numbers, Pinterest is planning to double its number of employees during 2013. If it does, it also has to keep growing in number of users to maintain the lead in users per employee. For right now, we guess Pinterest is fairly pleased with the $2.5 billion that the investors think it is worth. And for a company with no revenue, that is pretty impressive.
Data sources: Business Insider, Facebook, Forbes, LinkedIn, Macroaxis, Reuters, Statista, Tumblr, Twitter, The Wall Street Journal, Wikipedia
