This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by jeremiah-t
In this article, we explore how scraping LinkedIn data can lead to a significant competitive edge in business intelligence for any company.
Introduction to Open Web, External Data
In an era of digitization, data is becoming the core component for business growth. Today, apart from already collecting their internal data for analysis, companies are realizing the importance of open web data (external data) in gaining a competitive advantage.
There are millions of data sources but today we look at LinkedIn as a data source and how that can allow businesses to gain an edge.
LinkedIn is a “Gold Mine” for actionable, business data.
LinkedIn reports over 772 million users from across 200 countries. With a 1.25 billion global information worker population (people that use a smartphone, PC, or tablet for work an hour more per day in a typical week.) as of 2018 and growing, that is an estimated 70% (and growing) of all information workers listed on LinkedIn.
Consider that, and nearly 55 million companies, 14 million open jobs, and 36,000 skills listed on the platform, LinkedIn becomes an essential primary open web data source for business intelligence.
What Kind of Data is Available on LinkedIn?
There are thousands of data points available on the platform. However, there are some common types of data that are of utmost importance for clients and organizations. Here are some of the data points that are most commonly acquired using the available LinkedIn scraping services out there.
More than two new members join LinkedIn every second.
-Business of Apps
People Data
With the 772 million professional profiles on LinkedIn steadily increasing, you can now tap on the wealth of such People data. There are over 100 data points per LinkedIn profile. More importantly, LinkedIn's resume-style profiles are retrospective where a user fills in the full back-dated career or education history. This means you can effectively reconstruct an individual's entire professional career just from work experience in a data field.
Here are some data points available from an individual's LinkedIn Profile
Company Data
Companies now invest a serious amount of resources in maintaining their LinkedIn company profiles with key firmographic, social activity, and job data. Extracting basic firmographic data enables companies to stay ahead of the competition and understand the market landscape. Companies can use search filters like industry, company size, and geographic location to attain in-depth competitive intelligence.
You can extract fully enriched company data with crucial information such as:
Social Listening Data
Whether in Finance, Research, or any business discipline, what a company or top executive shares on social media platforms has value as an indicator with possible business impact. Newmarket expansion, M&As, product failures, executive hires, or departures can all be captured. This is especially true as companies and individuals start to be more active on LinkedIn.
The key is staying updated on such indicators by monitoring the social activities of companies and top business professionals.
You can derive information from the social activity data from LinkedIn by using the following data points:
How is LinkedIn Data Useful for Businesses?
With all that data available, how do businesses utilize this data in an effective manner to gain a competitive edge. To understand this, we will look at a couple of common use cases for the data.
Research
With the power of reconstructing whole careers using a LinkedIn profile, one can only imagine how vast this can be applied in the field of research.
Top-tier academic and research institutions are starting to discover the power of such data and are even starting to incorporate LinkedIn into their publications as references.
An example would be collecting all profiles affiliated with Company A from 2010 to 2016, extracting data points such as skills, and correlating that to the sales performance of Company A. One could then make inferences that certain skills found in employees would lead to an outperforming company. I'm no researcher but you get where I'm coming from.
Read more about how Researchers are using LinkedIn data here.
Human Resources
Human Resources, as the name suggests, is all about the people. And with LinkedIn essentially a resume database of all the professionals in the world, you can imagine the competitive advantage this gives any recruiter, HR tech SaaS or service provider. Of course, browsing them manually on LinkedIn is not very scalable but when you have all that data in its raw format, you have all the power. This data also lends itself very well to HR Tech companies like Hiretual and Arya who are utilizing Artificial Intelligence to source and match highly relevant candidates for a particular role using data found on a LinkedIn profile.
Read more about how HR companies are using LinkedIn data here.
Alumni (Corporate & Academia) Relations
As a college graduate, chances are, you would have received one of those alumni forms in the mail asking for an update of contact details. Chances also are, that you never filled that out. Universities want to know how your career develops upon graduation but only collect data on enrolment and graduation.
Most of the top-tier universities are also successful due to their strong alumni network and funding. And good alumni relations start with knowing who they are and where they are in their careers now.
Scraping LinkedIn data allows universities to track their alumni, group alumni based on seniority levels, industries, job functions and therefore build a strong alumni community. Identifying notable alumni also helps with building donor lists and encouraging new enrolment.
Read more about how Universities are using LinkedIn data here.
Alternative Data for Finance
Investing in companies, whether a start-up or a fortune 500 company has traditionally been about reading financial statements and reports. While that is a good indicator of output, it often does not tell the full story. Financial institutions are constantly looking for more alternative data to better evaluate the investment potential of a company. This is where people's data comes in when you think about it, talent fundamentally drives the performance of a company, and if you believe that then procuring as much data about a company's people aka employees becomes of utmost priority.
The power of having the full LinkedIn profile data of all employees from any company cannot be underestimated. Companies can use this data to analyze company hierarchies, functional compositions, educational backgrounds, and more. Thereafter, collecting this data monthly gives insights like key executive hires/departures, geographical market expansions, and talent acquisition strategies.
Read more about how Financial Institutions are using LinkedIn data here.
How to Scrape LinkedIn?
For the benefit of some readers, data scraping is a technique that uses computer programs that enables the extraction of data from numerous sources such as webpages, social media platforms, blogs, and e-commerce platforms. If you are technical and are willing to invest the required time and effort, you could explore building your own scraper but scraping LinkedIn has its unique set of challenges with the vast amount of data and platform restrictions. Another option would be looking at companies offering such professional scraping services.
There are a few LinkedIn scraping tools available on the market with differences in available data points, quality of data, and scale of aggregation. Choosing the right data partner is absolutely critical depending on your requirements unique to your business.
Here at Mantheos, our data aggregation techniques are constantly evolving to provide a LinkedIn scraping service that provides scraping at scale, well-structured/prepared datasets, comprehensive data points, and most importantly, high-quality data. This is showcased with our real-time LinkedIn scraping API that is designed to empower companies with a real-time people/company data pipeline that they can efficiently plug into their business processes and technologies.
Final Thoughts
LinkedIn data is amongst the most comprehensive and sought after data sources for People and Company data. This is expected to grow as the platform continues to acquire more users. The possibilities with the amount of data are simply endless and companies need to start capitalizing on this opportunity. Although there are growing concerns among users about data privacy issues, a controlled effort with specific guidelines to collect data from LinkedIn will ensure the users' legitimacy of data uses and privacy.
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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by jeremiah-t
jeremiah-t | Sciencx (2021-06-08T06:04:01+00:00) The Power of Scraping LinkedIn Data for Businesses. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/06/08/the-power-of-scraping-linkedin-data-for-businesses/
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