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


Big Data and Analytics became the largest group. Overall engagement rates decline, but liking a post is 6.5 times more common than commenting. Machine Learning & Data Science, KDnuggets, and Data Scientists have the highest engagement levels.



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.

Top Linkedin Groups, Discussions and Comments, 2009-2016
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.

Top Linkedin Groups 2016 Quadrant
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

Top Linkedin Groups 2016 Engagement Top 10
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 mbrEng/wk / 1k mbr
Median 2709433% 0.850.90
Big Data and Analytics (BD & A) 25372976% 1.381.92
Data Science Central (DSC) 24398823% 0.112.60
Business Intelligence Professionals (BI Pros) 18637214% 0.740.77
Big Data | Analytics | Strategy | Finance | Innovation (BDASFI) 17383133% 2.011.32
Business Analytics (Biz An) 13053471% 0.720.55
Data Mining, Statistics, Big Data, Data Visualization, and Data Science (DMSBD) 11630745% 0.090.11
BIG DATA Professionals - Architects Scientists IOT Analytics (BD pros) 7121533% 0.490.19
Big Data, Analytics, Hadoop, NoSQL & Cloud Computing (BDAHN) 6238531% 0.050.54
Data Warehouse / Big Data / Hadoop / Predictive Analytics (DW/BD/H) 4762034% 3.641.30
Machine Learning and Data Science (MLDS) 4348380% 0.814.75
Data Scientists (DScient) 3793986% 3.084.00
Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Machine Intelligence ... (PRDM) 3199546% 0.450.95
IBM Big Data and Analytics (IBM BDA) 2830868% 2.471.51
Data Science & Machine Learning (DS & ML) 2588156% 1.862.05
Machine Learning Connection (ML Conn) 24932-0.3% 0.390.57
Research Methods and Data Science (RMDS) 2409324% 1.290.90
Next Gen Market Research (NGMR) 238720.4% 0.890.49
Global Analytics Network (Global A) 2291711% 1.430.15
Predictive Analytics Network (PAN) 2246242% 0.410.20
RDataMining: R and Data Mining (RDM) 2195535% 0.661.40
Text Analytics (Text A) 2059220% 0.911.31
KDnuggets (KDnuggets) 2025871% 3.644.58
Advanced Analytics (Adv An) 18295-1.1% 0.960.91
Actuary / Actuarial, Predictive Modeling, Data Mining (u) (Actuary) 17866-2.5% 0.260.10
Data & Text Analytics Professionals (D&TA Prof) 1139919% 1.540.00
Advanced Analytics, Predictive Modeling & Statistical ... (Adv AP) 1117216% 0.070.00