LinkedIn Reveals Disinterest in Search and Retrieval

December 7, 2020

LinkedIn does quite a bit of info-ramming when either one of my team or I log in to the Microsoft social media system. Here’s the graphic displayed when we were checking to see if our automated posts from this blog were appearing:

image

The eight “cards” tell me about LinkedIn Groups in which I may have an interest. The little boxes reveal a small amount of information about the content access topics in which the unemployed, the consultants cruising for gigs, and the self-promoters have an interest.

The table below presents some of the data in this graphic in tabular form. No, I did not use Excel 365 connected to Teams. Sorry, Mother Microsoft. I still recall Bob. (You remember Bob, don’t you, gentle reader?)

LinkedIn Group Name Number of LinkedIn Followers
Data Science Central 374,694
Association for Intelligent Information Management 27,861
Scientific, Technical, Medical Publishing Group 12,253
Data & Text Analytics Professionals 12,503
Special Libraries Asso. 15,191
Semantic Web 15,098
Semantic Technologies Group 3,772
Enterprise Search & Discovery 624

LinkedIn does not reveal the hard count for its total number of registered humans, the number of human users who log on to the system once per week, or the number of paying human users. Hence, figuring out the percentage of LinkedIn members interested in these groups is a difficult task akin to predicting the share price of Palantir Technologies on January 1, 2022.

An outfit called Oberlo reports with confidence that LinkedIn has 660 million users. Close enough for horseshoes.

The table below presents the percentage of these LinkedIn users interested in each the groups suggested to me:

LinkedIn Group Name Percentage of LinkedIn Members Interested in These Topics
Data Science Central 0.0567718182%
Association for Intelligent Information Management 0.0042213636%
Scientific, Technical, Media Publishing Group 0.0018565152%
Data & Text Analytics Professionals 0.0018943939%
Special Libraries Asso. 0.0023016667%
Semantic Web 0.0022875758%
Semantic Technologies Group 0.0005715152%
Enterprise Search & Discovery 0.0000945455%

Eyeballing my math, surely there are errors. How can such a compelling subject as Enterprise Search & Discovery appeal to 0.0000945455 percent of the LinkedIn members.

What’s interesting is that an astounding 0.0042213636 percent of the LinkedIn membership are pulled to the Association for Intelligent Information Management.

And the semantic topics. Magnetic indeed.

What’s the analysis suggest? Anyone looking for a job in enterprise search may want to spin their expertise a different way.

Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2020

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