5 min guide to visualizing LinkedIn data with Google Data Studio: Birthday wishes

I received 200+ birthday wishes via LinkedIn last week, and it inspired me to try visualizing Linkedin data with Google Data Studio. To understand which language and word phrases people mentioned the most in the birthday wishes, I decided to create a word cloud. It only took less than 5 min to create the LinkedIn message cloud that you see in this article's featured image! It's so easy, and let me share what I did.

First, you need to prepare data. You can download your LinkedIn message in an Excel file with a few clicks.

On your LinkedIn page, go to 'Network > Connections'. Click on 'Manage synced and imported contacts' and then, click 'Export Contacts' on the next page. You can download messages by requesting an archive. Linkedin notifies you how long it takes; Your download will be ready in about 10 mins. After downloading the file (messages.csv), you can upload it to your Google Drive for easily connecting it to Google Data Studio.

5 min guide to visualizing LinkedIn data with Google Data Studio

Now, let's dive into this. Follow the steps below and you will have your LinkedIn message cloud on your screen in 5 min.

1. Create an empty report in Google Data Studio; use it for free.

2. Add data to report using 'Google Sheets'

After creating your Google Data Studio account, you will need to add data. Click on the Google Sheets, and search for 'messages' (your LinkedIn message file name) on the table column next to 'All Elements'. Once you found the file uploaded to Google Drive earlier, click on the Add button for adding it to your report.

3. Create a word cloud using Vega/Vega-Lite in 'Community Visualizations'

On the top menu navigation area, click on the shape icon. It opens a small window that shows 'Community Visualizations' options. Select the Vega/Vega-Lite option. Click on anywhere on your screen, then you will see the LinkedIn message cloud populated on your report page. Update the field dimensions to 'CONTENT' (or the data column header name if you've changed it in the file).

Now, you will be able to see the beautiful LinkedIn message cloud on your Google Data Studio report. You can try changing colours or layouts in the 'Design and Layout' menu. Thanks to everyone who sent me lovely birthday wishes in English, Korean, German, Chinese, Indonesian, Spanish and more!

It was a fun experience visualizing data with Google Data Studio. If you know of any easy-to-use data visualization platforms, please share the name in the comment below. Thanks for reading!