LinkedIn is a primary communication tool for professionals and companies across different industries. As it generates multiple posts, conversations, innovative ideas, and trends each day, leveraging Linkedin’s data is a great way to enhance your market share.
This blog elaborates on the importance of LinkedIn data and how it helps different professionals. It also covers the different types of valuable data available on LinkedIn and the tools and techniques for ethical LinkedIn data mining.
Whether you are a recruiter, marketer, or sales executive, this blog will help you increase your knowledge around LinkedIn data collection and evaluation for successful business growth.
Started as a platform for professionals to connect and network, LinkedIn is now widely used for brand building, knowledge sharing, hiring, job searching, and learning and development.
As a lot of posts, comments, and shares are generated each day on LinkedIn, it has become a hub of insightful data! Accurate collection and mining of this data can benefit professionals, marketers, and brands on LinkedIn to tailor content, target the right audience, and engage directly to establish their thought leadership.
Access to this data is also useful for people working across various departments of a firm like HR & recruitment, sales & business development, advertising and PR, and competitor research & analysis.
Tools and techniques for LinkedIn data mining
LinkedIn prohibits using third-party or automated tools for the collection of data, but certain technologies that you can leverage to accelerate your LinkedIn data mining process include:
- LinkedIn Premium tools for business leaders:
For data mining and collection, professionals can upgrade their LinkedIn accounts and avail premium services. It is a paid solution that helps professionals use advanced search filters based on geography, industry, company size, and job titles to get data related to their target audience.
It also contains features like ‘profile views,’ where you can see who has viewed your business account and know the potential clients, collaborators, or competitors interested in your offerings.
The ‘Salary Insights’ feature allows you to compare industry benchmarks, competitor salaries, and your salaries to understand compensation trends in your industry.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator (focussing directly on sales professionals):
It falls under LinkedIn’s premium services but is explicitly designed to assist lead generation and sales. Business development professionals get direct profile recommendations to target them for sales.
Users of this tool also get real-time updates about their leads’ activities, InMail credits for direct selling through personalized messages, and metrics to track their sales analytics and results.
A specialized sales navigator tool, “TeamLink,” helps to see if any team member is directly connected to a lead on LinkedIn. This collaborative network helps find leads faster as a team and boosts outreach efforts.
While LinkedIn data is robust and rich in facts, it is quite extensive, too! For scalable data-driven decisions, collecting, mining, organizing, and interpreting this data can take up a lot of time and workforce.
Moreover, as LinkedIn also has explicit policies to safeguard personal and professional data of all accounts, it becomes easier for an amateur to scrape data while conforming to such policies. When such challenges arrive, professionals or companies often turn to LinkedIn Data Mining Services.
The experts there follow ethical data extraction practices, safeguard your account from any legal actions, and give you all the information that your business needs!
Valuable information you can gather through LinkedIn data mining
A bulk of educational, occupational, and organizational data is available publicly on LinkedIn, which can assist in devising short-term and long-term business strategies. Some essential details you can gather through LinkedIn include:
- Company specifications like location, size, industry classification, awards and accolades, and recent campaigns to understand competitors’ behavior.
- Job posting details like hiring companies, emerging roles, and job descriptions to understand the industry’s current hiring and pay scale trends and make sound decisions.
- Company updates like news or social initiatives. Or announcements of other firms to stay updated about industry developments or potential partnership opportunities.
- Content engagement metrics like comments or shares on a particular post or article refine content strategy based on content trends and audience engagement.
- Follower demographics to understand the audience’s exact composition, create tailored marketing strategies, and identify potential customers.
- Skills and endorsements are needed to understand the popular skill sets in a specific industry and how many people are equipped with such skills that impact hiring trends.
- Job changes include updates on prominent positions, promotions, and movements of professionals within the industry. This helps in understanding career progression graphs, hierarchies, and industry movements.
- Geographic data like city, state, or country information of different firms or professionals is used to understand regional trends and to target specific areas or groups for business development.
LinkedIn Data Mining Services – How can an external team help?
Mining such massive data in-house while adhering to LinkedIn’s privacy policies can get hectic and tricky. But you always have the choice to outsource LinkedIn data mining.
The team of experts exhibits years of expertise in collecting and sorting data relevant to your industry. They offer job data, company data, contractor and employee data, and LinkedIn posts data extraction services at nominal costs.
Service providers use APIs, scripts, and other advanced mining techniques to deliver data that is compliant with industry standards. The advantages of hiring them include:
- Getting accurate results:
You can avail yourself of the exclusive expertise of professionals with years of experience in the LinkedIn data mining domain. They ensure error-free, up-to-date, and insightful data delivery within stipulated time frames.
- Availing cost-saving advantages:
By eliminating recruiting, training, and infrastructure costs, outsourcing becomes an advantageous choice. The ongoing salary and incentive-related expenses can be avoided, and you can avail advantages of flexible service plans offered by the external team.
- Enhancing the company’s overall efficiency:
As many business departments rely on results obtained through data analysis to formulate strategies and work plans, outsourcing helps you gather and access this data with the utmost efficiency.
They use technology, equipment, and methodologies at par with industry standards that may require more work to set up in-house. Departments like sales, HR, or marketing relying on this data can easily boost their engaging strategies and target qualified leads.
Conclusion:
Service providers follow a systematic approach to understand your needs and the final purpose of extracting a specific data type. They conduct a sample data set evaluation that will help you get acquainted with their team’s functioning, credibility, and efficiency.
The meticulously scraped data can be deployed across departments to understand better your target market, industry standards, and competitor behaviors. With the help of such professional LinkedIn data mining services, you can transform data into actionable strategies, leverage a vast professional network, and make informed decisions suitable for your industry.
