Tutorial 3

LinkedIn data for Business and Economics

Date: Thursday, 27 June
Time: 16:15-18:15
Room: DECS Lab

LinkedIn serves as a valuable discourse metric in the realm of professional networking and communication. It acts as a multifaceted platform where individuals, businesses, and organizations engage in discussions, share insights, and showcase their expertise. In this regard, it is not merely a social network but a dynamic ecosystem that reflects the discourse and trends within various industries and fields. LinkedIn’s dynamic nature captures the evolving sentiments and discussions of important global topics.

LinkedIn’s data quality and importance have been well highlighted with many researchers having extensively used online data from social networking platforms on different topics. A recent Scopus search with “LinkedIn” in the articles’ “Title”, “Abstract” or “Keywords” resulted in 3030 documents with most popular subject areas being the “Computer Science”, “Business management and Accounting” and “Social Sciences” with 1446, 651 and 650 hits, respectively.

In this tutorial, LinkedIn will be used as a data source for searching into company profiles and job posts as it provides huge data volumes, while a user standard profile version can be created and maintained for free.

On LinkedIn, companies state in their online profiles the topics they operate in. With the use of keywords certain number of companies among the 70.000.000 available online can be selected. Then their profiles can be scrapped for selecting information based on predefined fields they need to enter to the platform to showcase new variable creation techniques.

Among others, LinkedIn hosts companies’ profiles containing diverse information regarding location, foundation year, industry sector, specialties, employees, followers, description, etc. Each company decides the quality and quantity of information registered in its profile, usually aiming to state its activities and direction. These are qualitative and quantitative variables that can be used for further analysis in specific topics and regions.
Similarly data can be obtained from the more than 14.000.000 job posts that contain description and other variables like Experience level, data from the companies offering, modes of operation, time employment, industry they refer to, job function, and commitments.

Participants will be qualified to directly apply the research tools explained in their field of experience. This is a 2 hours hands on tutorial which, if of interest, can be expanded to half a day duration with one or two more trainers involving additional mining and analysis techniques.

Outline

  • Company creation profile in LinkedIn to acquaint with the existing variables
  • Keyword search techniques
  • Social Impact inferred by external variables (“Followers” and “Associated Members”). These are variables not directly controlled by the company administrators
  • Geographical variable creation
  • Time series variable creation
  • Social media activity and presence variables
  • Limitations

Target Audience

This is open to any level of researchers, early stage and signor researchers can equally benefit. Participation prerequisites a LinkedIn profile, which is free and easy to create. Not specific knowledge is necessary apart from basic use of the platform.

A study of the following articles can be useful, the rest will be practically demonstrated. This reading list will be updated with some more articles, currently under review or revision:

  1. Daglis, T., Tsironis G., & Tsagarakis K.P. (2024). The 21 most practiced RE-s of Circular Economy from LinkedIn Company Profiles on a Global Scale. Resources, Conservation & Recycling Advances, 200202
  2. Daglis, T., Tsagarakis, K.P. (2024). A LinkedIn-based analysis of the U.S. dynamic adaptations in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare Analytics, 5, art. no. 100291
  3. Caferra, R., Tsironis, G., Morone, A., Tsagarakis, K. P., Morone, P., & D’Adamo, I. (2023). Is the circular economy proposed as sustainability in firm mission statements? A semantic analysis. Environmental Technology & Innovation, 32, 103304.
  4. Daglis, T., Tsironis G., & Tsagarakis K.P. (2023). Data mining techniques for the investigation of the circular economy and sustainability relationship. Resources, Conservation & Recycling Advances 19, 200151.
  5. Knäble D., & Tsagarakis K.P. (2023) “Made in Germany” how companies approach Circular Economy on LinkedIn. European Planning Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2023.2228343
  6. Tsironis, G., & Tsagarakis, K.P. (2023). Global online networking for circular economy companies in fashion, apparel, and textiles industries, the LinkedIn platform. Current Opinion in Green and Sustainable Chemistry, 41 doi:10.1016/j.cogsc.2023.100809
  7. Tsironis, G., Daglis, T., & Tsagarakis, K.P. (2022). Social media and EU companies’ engagement in circular economy: A LinkedIn approach. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 32, 802-816.

Presenter

Konstantinos Tsagarakis is a Professor of “Economics of Environmental Science and Technology” in the School of Production Engineering and management at the Technical University of Crete. He holds a degree from the department of Civil Engineering of the Democritus University of Thrace, a BA degree from the Department of Economics of the University of Crete and a Ph.D. Degree in Public Health from the School of Civil Engineering from the University of Leeds, UK. His research interests include: circular economy, technical–economic project evaluation; environmental and energy economics; public health economics; environmental and energy behavior; big data; online behavior; environmental performance of firms; quantitative methods. His research work has been published in more than 110 papers in refereed journals and has been cited in more than 3200 papers by others (according to Scopus database; h-index: 30), more than 6000 in google scholar. He is Specialty Chief Editor in Circular Economy Section Frontiers in Sustainability, Associate Editor in Water Policy and Healthcare Analytics, Subject Editor in Sustainable Consumption and Production and has served as Guest Editor in several other journals. Further information about the publishing and editorial records can be found here:

https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/N-1403-2017
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=d5u6H60AAAAJ&hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/konstantinos-tsagarakis-a41a6425/