Top LinkedIn Groups for Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science in 2016

3. Engagement

Unlike last year, we did not have the full data on conversations and comments, but we used the data on the latest 200 conversations in each group to estimate these rates per week.

The overall picture, shown in Fig. 3 below, showing continuing decline in average member engagement, from about 1.93 discussions per 1000 members per week in 2015 to 1.17 in 2016, and from 0.55 comments per 1000 members per week in 2015 to only about 0.17 in 2016. So on average, only about 1 in 5,900 group members makes comments, and there is probably an active core of the group which makes most of the comments.

Liking a post is 6.5 times more frequent than commenting - there are on average 1.11 Likes per week per 1000 members.

Here is the global trend.


Fig. 3: Top LinkedIn Analytics, Big Data, Data Science groups
Discussions & Comments per week per 1000 members from 2009 to 2016

We can also analyze the groups separately by mapping into quadrants along the axes of Conversations/week/1K members and Engagement/week/1K members, where Engagement is defined as Comments + Likes.


Fig. 4: Top LinkedIn Analytics, Big Data, Data Science groups - Engaged, Commenting, Posting, and Passive
Circle size corresponds to group size, and color to membership growth rate in 2016 (redder - faster growth, blue - decline).

Here are the 10 groups with the highest Engagement


Fig. 5: Top LinkedIn Analytics, Big Data, Data Science groups

Top 10 groups with the highest engagement (comments + likes)

• Machine Learning and Data Science, 4.75
• KDnuggets, 4.58
• Data Scientists, 4.00
• Data Science Central, 2.60
• Data Science & Machine Learning, 2.05
• Big Data and Analytics, 1.92
• IBM Big Data and Analytics, 1.51
• RDataMining: R and Data Mining, 1.40
• Big Data | Analytics | Strategy | Finance | Innovation, 1.32
• Text Analytics, 1.31

Finally, here is the table with all the group information.

Table 3: Top LinkedIn Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science groups, 2016 Q1
Conv/wk /1k mbr: Conversations/week per 1000 members, Oct 2016
Eng/wk /1k mbr: Engag/week per 1000 members, Oct 2016

LinkedIn Group	Members (Sep 30, 2016)	Growth rate 2016	Conv/wk /1k mbr	Eng/wk / 1k mbr
Median	27094	33%	0.85	0.90
Big Data and Analytics (BD & A)	253729	76%	1.38	1.92
Data Science Central (DSC)	243988	23%	0.11	2.60
Business Intelligence Professionals (BI Pros)	186372	14%	0.74	0.77
Big Data | Analytics | Strategy | Finance | Innovation (BDASFI)	173831	33%	2.01	1.32
Business Analytics (Biz An)	130534	71%	0.72	0.55
Data Mining, Statistics, Big Data, Data Visualization, and Data Science (DMSBD)	116307	45%	0.09	0.11
BIG DATA Professionals - Architects Scientists IOT Analytics (BD pros)	71215	33%	0.49	0.19
Big Data, Analytics, Hadoop, NoSQL & Cloud Computing (BDAHN)	62385	31%	0.05	0.54
Data Warehouse / Big Data / Hadoop / Predictive Analytics (DW/BD/H)	47620	34%	3.64	1.30
Machine Learning and Data Science (MLDS)	43483	80%	0.81	4.75
Data Scientists (DScient)	37939	86%	3.08	4.00
Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Machine Intelligence ... (PRDM)	31995	46%	0.45	0.95
IBM Big Data and Analytics (IBM BDA)	28308	68%	2.47	1.51
Data Science & Machine Learning (DS & ML)	25881	56%	1.86	2.05
Machine Learning Connection (ML Conn)	24932	-0.3%	0.39	0.57
Research Methods and Data Science (RMDS)	24093	24%	1.29	0.90
Next Gen Market Research (NGMR)	23872	0.4%	0.89	0.49
Global Analytics Network (Global A)	22917	11%	1.43	0.15
Predictive Analytics Network (PAN)	22462	42%	0.41	0.20
RDataMining: R and Data Mining (RDM)	21955	35%	0.66	1.40
Text Analytics (Text A)	20592	20%	0.91	1.31
KDnuggets (KDnuggets)	20258	71%	3.64	4.58
Advanced Analytics (Adv An)	18295	-1.1%	0.96	0.91
Actuary / Actuarial, Predictive Modeling, Data Mining (u) (Actuary)	17866	-2.5%	0.26	0.10
Data & Text Analytics Professionals (D&TA Prof)	11399	19%	1.54	0.00
Advanced Analytics, Predictive Modeling & Statistical ... (Adv AP)	11172	16%	0.07	0.00