Visualizing Your LinkedIn Network: Uncovering Valuable Insights with Personal Network Maps

Howdy,

In our day-to-day corporate life, Linkedin became an essential part of communication. We connect with various professionals throughout our career progression. Hence, Linkedin does not give any built-in visualization for understanding our network.

In this post, I’ll guide you to create an easy visualization in Google Data Studio for a better understanding of your network from your LinkedIn profile data. Let’s jump into the actual work -

Downloading the personal Linkedin Information

1. Go to your LinkedIn profile ->Settings & Privacy -> Data Privacy -> Get a copy of your data

Select the above option ‘Download larger data archive, including connections, contacts, account history, and information we infer about you based on your profile and activity.’ and click on “Request Archive’.

Your data files will be mailed to you in some time by LinkedIn.

After you download the data, you’ll find a bunch of CSV files. There will be one connection.csv file. Upload that file into your google drive.

You’ll find a similar file like this one. Delete the first three columns, and you are ready to work on actual visualization.

Visualization in Google Data Studio

Go to Data Studio and create a new blank report.

You’ll find a similar blank page.

Now, Import the Google Sheet into the Data Studio

Click — Add data -> Google Sheets

Click — URL -> Paste your Google Sheets Link and click the Add Button.

Now you are done adding the Data. It’s time to visualize.

Data Cleaning

For making a more understandable chart you can easily clean up some of the data. e.g. Jr. Software Engineer, Sr. Software Engineer, Software Engineer.

You can group them as Software Engineer in a single position, then it will be more perfect to look at.

CASE
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(LOWER(Position), “hr|human|talent|recruiter”) THEN “Human Resources”
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(LOWER(Position), “software engineer”) THEN “Software Engineer”
ELSE Position

Here I have added some sample code. You can easily add more groups to it and create a new field in the Data Studio and add this code to the function. It will create a new column based on your new group.

1. Line chart

Add a line chart for visualizing your LinkedIn connection growth year on year.

2. Wordcloud — Vega/Vega-Lite Chart

Add Vega/Vega-Lite Chart for visualizing the world cloud of the work positions of your connections. It will give you an overall idea about your connections profession.

3. Treemap

This chart will give you the overall idea of your connections organizations. You can easily find out on which company how many of your connections are working.

4. kumu.io

This is another website, where you can upload your data and get an interactive graph like this. Then embed it to Data Studio.

You can check the Live Dashboard here:

Linkedin Connection Visualization

Have Fun Visualization. Thanks for reading.

Feel free to hit me up on Facebook, LinkedIn, or down below, if you have any questions, critiques, or compliments 😄