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

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

1. Big Data and Analytics	253,729 members
2. Data Science Central (former Advanced Business Analytics...)	243,988
3. Business Intelligence Professionals	186,372
4. Big Data | Analytics | Strategy | Finance | Innovation	173,831
5. Business Analytics	130,534
6. Data Mining, Statistics, Big Data, ...	116,307
7. BIG DATA Professionals - Architects Scientists IOT Analytics	71,215
8. Big Data, Analytics, Hadoop, NoSQL & Cloud Computing	62,385
9. Data Warehouse / Big Data / Hadoop / Predictive Analytics	47,620
10. Machine Learning and Data Science , 43483

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

For more detailed analysis, including group engagement and 4 quadrants , see my post on KDnuggets:

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

https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/10/top-linkedin-groups-analytics-big-data-mining-data-science.html