LinkedIn has passed the milestone of 200 million members worldwide, with Sir Richard Branson and Barack Obama the most followed people on the business networking website, Digital Spy said.

LinkedIn, which was the first major social network to go public in summer 2011, said that new members are signing up to the service at a rate of two per second.

The company has added more than 13 million new members since its last big announcement on November 1, 2012.

Since reaching 100m members in March 2011, LinkedIn has added 13 new languages, meaning the site is available in a total of 19 languages. More than 64% of LinkedIn members are located outside the US.

According to comScore data for the month of November 2012, LinkedIn counts more than 160m unique monthly visitors and is the 23rd most visited web property in the world.

Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson is the most popular person on LinkedIn with 1,228,389 followers, followed by Obama (615,904 followers).

YouTube co-founder Deepak Chopra comes next, ahead of life coach guru Tony Robbins and LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner.

Most LinkedIn members are based in the US (74m), followed by India (18m), the UK (11m), Brazil (11m), and Canada (7m).

Information technology is the most common profession for LinkedIn members (4m), ahead of financial services (2.03m), higher education (1.95m), computer and software (1.65m) and telecoms (1.59m).