Soon after my 2015 post about LinkedIn Groups Top LinkedIn Groups for Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science - Discussions up, Engagement down, LinkedIn - who certainly saw the same trends of declining engagement - has removed the full group statistics from public view.

The members can still see the group size, which continues to grow for most groups, but not the total number of discussions (now renamed to conversations) or comments, which continues to decline. A group member can see about 200 most recent conversations in the group, whether it takes place over 4 days or 400.

So what is happening to LinkedIn Groups? How fast are they growing?

What is the rate of conversations. comments, and likes (introduced in 2015)?

Where do groups fall in the quadrants of Active, Posting, Commenting, and Passive?

I collected the group membership on Jan 1 and Sep 30, 2016 and with the help of KDnuggets editors Prasad Pore, Matt Mayo, and Anmol Rajpurohit collected the group conversations around October 7, 2016 for 26 of the largest LinkedIn groups in Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science.

I also computed annual growth rate for 2015 and 2016 from Mar 30, 2015, Jan 1, 2016, and Sep 30, 2016 by simple extrapolation: annual growth = (9 month growth)^4/3.

Key Findings

• Overall engagement continues to decline, to 1.17 conversations per week per 1000 members, and only about 0.17 comments per week per 1000 members, but is helped by likes: 1.11 per week per 1000 members
• Big Data and Analytics became the largest group, replacing Data Science Central (former Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling)
• Data Scientists, Machine Learning and Data Science, and Big Data and Analytics are the fastest growing groups in 2016
• Machine Learning and Data Science, KDnuggets, and Data Scientists have the highest engagement levels (comments + likes)

1. Largest Groups

Here are the 10 largest groups, as of Sep 30, 2016. There were only 2 changes in the top 10 groups:

• Big Data and Analytics became the largest group, replacing Data Science Central
• Machine Learning and Data Science moved to 10th place, up from 14th, replacing Machine Learning Connection which stopped growing.

Table 1: Top 10 Largest LinkedIn Groups in Big Data, Data Science

Rank 2016	LinkedIn Group	Members Sep 30, 2016	Members Mar 30, 2015	Growth Rate 2016
1	Big Data and Analytics	253,729	120,776	75.6%
2	Data Science Central (former Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling)	243,988	174,362	23.2%
3	Business Intelligence Professionals	186,372	150,147	13.8%
4	Big Data | Analytics | Strategy | Finance | Innovation	173,831	128,805	32.5%
5	Business Analytics	130,534	70,326	70.7%
6	Data Mining, Statistics, Big Data, Data Visualization, and Data Science	116,307	68,539	45.2%
7	BIG DATA Professionals - Architects Scientists IOT Analytics	71,215	45,443	33.4%
8	Big Data, Analytics, Hadoop, NoSQL & Cloud Computing	62,385	33,139	31.0%
9	Data Warehouse / Big Data / Hadoop / Predictive Analytics	47,620	32,994	34.2%
10	Machine Learning and Data Science	43,483	20,876	79.5%

2. Growth

The 10 largest groups grew at a similar rate, except the top Big Data & Analytics group - see Fig 1, but the next 20 groups showed a lot more variety, with some groups like Data Scientists and KDnuggets growing fast, but many groups showing very slow growth or declining.


Fig. 1: Top 10 LinkedIn Groups in Big Data, Data Science: Growth 2015-2016


Fig. 2: Next 20 LinkedIn Groups in Big Data, Data Science: Growth 2015-2016

Table 2: Top 10 Fastest Growing (in 2016) LinkedIn Groups in Big Data, Data Science

Rank	LinkedIn Group	Growth Rate 2015	Growth Rate 2016
1	Data Scientists	102%	86%
2	Machine Learning and Data Science	48%	80%
3	Big Data and Analytics	53%	76%
4	Business Analytics	34%	71%
5	KDnuggets Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Science	85%	71%
6	IBM Big Data and Analytics	49%	68%
7	Data Science & Machine Learning	166%	56%
8	Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Machine Intelligence ...	14%	46%
9	Data Mining, Statistics, Big Data, Data Visualization, and Data Science	39%	45%
10	Predictive Analytics Network	52%	42%

Next, we examine the group engagement