The newspapers featured pictures of the recipients and captions personalised with their names, and were sent in a package also containing a press release, branded balloon and LinkedIn hoodie.

The newspapers were printed by Shoreditch-based LovePrint, the balloons by packaging, POP and branded merchandise printers and print managers InnerWorkings and the hoodies by InnerWorkings subsidiary Merchandise Mania.

The campaign’s newspapers were printed on LovePrint’s Xerox DocuTech on Cyclus 100gsm paper. This substrate was chosen to recreate the look and feel of a newspaper.

“When you get down to that weight it’s off-white so it has that look and texture of a newspaper,” said account manager at LovePrint Steve Eggeman. “It was getting the balance between that and the print not showing through.”

Darain Faraz, communicatons manager at LinkedIn, said: “We were really delighted with the campaign. 15 million users is quite a milestone for us.”

He added: “The thinking was to stimulate social media; we’ve seen a huge amount of banter online.”

With the hoodie styled with a ‘University of LinkedIn’ logo, the campaign was also geared around the launch of a dedicated online space for UK students at students.linkedin.com/uk, and the unveiling of LinkedIn’s 'Students Have Your Say' survey.

The survey found that two in three UK students feel unprepared for the world of work, with 52% attributing this to universities not teaching them the skills they need to find a job.

LinkedIn now has 277m users globally. The site has seen a 50% increase in UK users from 10m in September 2012, with UK members now including 66 rocket scientists, 12,530 journalists, 59 body builders, 146 chimney sweeps…and five mermaids.