A joint LinkedIn network graph

It was quite some time since I last wrote about "social network graphs", but network graphs have been a core interest of mine ever since.

In this post I look at the "joint LinkedIn graph" for a group of nine individuals (of which one is me). I will show a number of  network graphs, and explain what we are looking at. The full graph looks like this: 

To explain how it is structured we will start with a much smaller and simpler graph:

These nine nodes are the individuals whose "joint LinkedIn network graph" we will look at. The numbers indicate the size of their own LinkedIn network, how many contacts they have. In total these nine individuals have close to 10 400 contacts on LinkedIn. But a number of the contacts are shared, so the complete network consists of almost 9 900 contacts.

The information was submitted over a period of time, with approx a month between the first and the last data set. (Data is from November 2024). The lines (edges) indicate which of the individuals are connected on LinkedIn.

Now we will place these nine nodes in a circle, and fix their positions:

You can see that this graph is fairly "connected", many of the possible edges between nodes are in place, which means that many of these nine individuals are connected on LinkedIn. Out of the 36 possible connections, 22 are made.

The next step is to bring in all of the other, close to 10 000, connections. Most of them are only related to one of the black nodes, and a few hundreds are connected to two or more of the black, seed, nodes, This is the version of the graph that we looked at first in the post:

There is a yellow "aura" around each black node; these are the contacts that are not shared with any other black node.

Then there are green, blue and red nodes - these are the shared contacts. Green nodes are contacts shared between two seed nodes, blue are shared by three and the few red ones are shared by four.

There are clear green clusters on the map, these clusters represent the set of contacts that are shared between two specific seed nodes. All the shared connections serves also as edges between the seed nodes.

If we release the fixed positions of the black nodes, and let all the nodes "self-arrange" (in this case using a force atlas algorithm), we get another version of the graph:

Here the positions also of the black nodes have a semantic meaning, you start to see clusters of the seed nodes based on the shared contacts. As a quick observation - the simplified network with just the seed nodes was quite dense, and did not suggest specific clusters. But using the shared network data the network interaction of the seed nodes starts to emerge.

The number of shared contacts, the number of green, blue and red nodes, is just above 400. And most of them, around 350 ("the green ones"), are only shared between 2 seed nodes. There are just above 50 nodes that are blue and red. One observation is that "most contacts are not shared", out of the almost 10 000 unique nodes most are yellow, unshared. Only a few hundred are shared.

How can these graphs be used? Are there any practical applications of the network view?

"Of course there is", is my simple answer. There are many ways to use this map to navigate. What opportunities do you see? What questions does these visualizations bring into your mind? Bring your thoughts forward in a comment here.

If you are interested in how a shared LinkedIn network look like in your specific context please reach out. If you have a team a shared network map can be created easily if you are most curious on the result. If you and your team would like to learn more about network graph modeling and visualization this type of data is a good starting point, especially since you can relate to the various aspects of your LinkedIn contact network. I am happy to host a workshop for your team!