In a tough economy it may appear that South African job seekers are turning to online professional services network, LinkedIn, to connect with prospective employers.

On Tuesday, research firms World Wide Worx and Fuseware released data from the SA Social Media Landscape 2015 study, which found that there are now 3.8 million LinkedIn users in the country. According to the research this is a 40% increase compared to last year.

LinkedIn allows workers and employers to create profiles and "connections" with each other in an online social network.

Growth of LinkedIn in South Africa comes amid a sluggish South African economy.

Strikes in the mining industry earlier this year as well as unemployment rate hovering at 25% are key reasons why experts forecast that the South African economy will struggle to grow by even 2% this year.

“Every social network has its own dynamics,” said Mike Wronski, chief executive officer of data analytics company Fuseware.

“The secret for companies trying to leverage social networks lies not only in numbers of users, but also in how heavily those users engage in these networks. Twitter has more intensive engagement than Facebook, despite having substantially fewer users,” Wronski said in a statement.

Other notable rising social networks for the year include Facebook with 11.8 million South Africans on the popular social network as of August 2014.

9.2 million of those users access the popular social network on their mobile phones, the statement notes.

Last year Facebook had 9.4 million users in the country, according to research from World Wide Worx.

In addition, YouTube and Instagram users in South Africa increased by 53% and 65% respectively over the past year.

Google's YouTube reached an active user base of 7.2 million South Africans.

Growth in YouTube viewing comes as networking equipment firm, Cisco, earlier this year predicted that video will make up 78% of South Africa's mobile data traffic by 2018, compared to 50% at the end of 2013.

Meanwhile, the World Wide Worx and Fuseware research points to how Instagram grew from 680,000 active South African users in 2013 to 1.1 million in 2014.

Local social network Mxit suffered a yet another decline in numbers with active users decreasing from 6.5 million a year ago to 4.9 million in August 2014.