Is LinkedIn going to become the next Facebook?
Mukul Singla, Sandeep Kumar Yadav, Sandeep Sandeep, Krishna Dutt, Garima Chhikara · 2023
Nowadays many people spend substantial amount of time on social networks and tend to express their emotions and sentiments more on online platforms than anywhere else. Writing has always been an easy way for many people to express themselves and social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn pave a path. LinkedIn has always been a professional platform from its nascent days and it also provides a great dataset of posts to analyse the sentiment of people over time. More than 900 million profiles on LinkedIn justifies our statement and provides us with a good basis to analyse the sentiments of different people in different segments at different times. In this paper, we have analysed the sentiment of people over time using their LinkedIn posts with special focus over COVID-19 period, and its pre and post periods. A scrapping mechanism was formulated and implemented to get dataset of more than 40,000 user profiles and 50,000 posts on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has changed a lot over time and we have analysed its trends and patterns over time using various metrics to comment on its future and whether it will remain a professional platform or become a next social media platform like Facebook. Sentiments were classified in different categories using polarity and subjectivity data and trends were identified using patterns in keywords, hashtags and hashtag groups (formed from hashtags).