Visualize Your LinkedIn Network: 3 Meaningful Methods

The Enduring Value of LinkedIn for Professional Networking

For me, LinkedIn consistently proves to be a highly valuable social media platform. Its primary strength lies in its focused, business-centric nature and relative lack of extraneous content.

Despite maintaining a substantial network, I rarely experience unwanted solicitations or disruptive interactions. Unlike other platforms, LinkedIn largely avoids random, unsolicited contact from individuals attempting to initiate conversation or promote their offerings.

A key feature is the requirement to define the basis of your connection when sending a request. This ensures that your network is comprised of meaningful, professionally relevant relationships.

Leveraging Your LinkedIn Network

This structured approach provides access to a rich source of business-related intelligence. You can readily determine your relationship to any company or individual you need to contact.

Furthermore, LinkedIn facilitates introductions to individuals beyond your direct network, utilizing your existing first-degree connections as intermediaries.

Utilizing your LinkedIn connections effectively can unlock significant opportunities for both career advancement and personal development.

Tools to Enhance Your LinkedIn Experience

To maximize the benefits of your network, consider these three helpful tools:

Relationship Mapping: Visualize how you're connected to key people and organizations.
Introduction Requests: Seamlessly request introductions to expand your reach.
Alumni Search: Discover and connect with former colleagues and classmates.

These resources can significantly streamline your networking efforts and help you achieve your professional goals.

Exploring Your Professional Connections with InMaps

InMaps, a project originating from LinkedIn's internal labs, offers a visual depiction of your professional network. This tool meticulously examines your connections and the relationships between them, subsequently organizing them into distinct network clusters.

Processing time may be considerable for extensive networks, but the resulting insights are valuable.

The primary function of InMaps is to assist in identifying key influencers within your professional sphere.

Individuals represented by larger dots and prominently sized names possess a greater number of connections.
Selecting a specific dot reveals the individual you are connected to, alongside the areas where your connections intersect.

Furthermore, the network map utilizes color-coding to denote various affiliations and groups from your professional history. These can include former employers, alumni networks, or shared industry experience.

This visualization proves particularly useful for expanding your reach and strengthening your network. It provides crucial context regarding how individuals are connected and the basis of their relationships.

InMaps effectively transforms your network from a simple list of contacts into a dynamic and informative map.

Understanding Your Professional Network with MyWebCareer

MyWebCareer is a comprehensive platform designed to analyze and present your professional connections from LinkedIn and Facebook. It leverages advanced link analysis, visualization techniques, and semantic technologies to provide valuable insights.

The platform processes information extracted from your LinkedIn profile through a semantic and entity extraction engine. This process facilitates the exploration of a consolidated view of your digital footprint across various online platforms and search engines.

For instance, the tool allows users to pinpoint their primary company affiliations and the dominant industries in which they participate:

Although the visualization and graphing capabilities are noteworthy, the core functionality resides within the "My Network" feature. This provides an intuitive visual interface for navigating your combined Career & Social Graph.

Selecting a company from the provided list reveals which of your connections are associated with it, and the nature of those connections. The following key indicates the relationship types:

Red Links: Represent current employment.
Blue Links: Indicate past employment.
Link Thickness: Corresponds to the duration of employment at the company.

Integrating your Facebook account with MyWebCareer expands the analysis. You can then determine whether connections originate through LinkedIn, Facebook, or both platforms.

As an example, the following illustrates my LinkedIn network related to About.com. The visualization displays the length of their involvement, current employment status, and your connection pathway:

Leveraging ManyEyes for LinkedIn Network Visualization

ManyEyes, a versatile and freely available visualization platform (a detailed review can be found here), offers the capability to analyze and graphically represent any dataset you upload. LinkedIn connections can be exported as a comprehensive list utilizing the AddressBookExport tool.

This exported list will include essential details for each contact, such as their complete name, email address, current job title, and employer.

Data Included in the Export

Each contact's full name is provided.
The associated email address is included.
Current professional positions are listed.
The company each contact works for is identified.

The latter two data points – position and company – are particularly valuable for creating insightful visualizations, especially when dealing with extensive networks.

A small amount of formatting is typically required for your .CSV file before uploading. In this instance, the necessary adjustments were minimal.

Formatting the CSV File

Data was separated into distinct columns using commas.
Descriptive column headers were added for clarity.
Unnecessary rows were removed, if applicable.

After formatting, the data can be copied and pasted into ManyEyes. It’s crucial to verify that the data is correctly interpreted during the preview stage.

From the available visualization options, a suitable type and pattern should be selected. A Matrix Chart was chosen to illustrate the distribution of positions across different companies, utilizing color-coding for enhanced clarity.

This tool proves effective in identifying companies with the highest number of connections within your network.

Have you considered utilizing LinkedIn to expand your professional connections? Do you believe these visualization tools could be beneficial to your networking efforts?