Just 13% of my Linkedin connections use buzzwords

13 December 2013

Linkedin recently released it’s newest analysis of overused buzzwords in members’ profiles. Of course, this is just a ploy to get you to volunteer more personal details («Update your profile today!»), but never mind that.

Just in case, I checked whether any of my connections engage in overusing buzzwords. Reassuringly, the majority can’t even be bothered to fill out «summaries» and «specialties» in the first place. Those who do, seldom use the top-ten buzzwords for the Netherlands, as the table below shows.

Term Percentage Term Percentage Verantwoordelijk 0.0 Responsible 0.5 Strategisch 1.8 Strategic 3.2 Expert 3.7 Expert 3.7 Creatief 0.9 Creative 1.8 Innovatief 0.0 Innovative 1.4 Dynamisch 0.0 Dynamic 0.5 Gedreven 0.5 Motivated 0.9 Duurzaam 0.0 Sustainable 1.4 Effectief 0.0 Effective 0.5 Analytisch 0.9 Analytic 0.5

Only two Dutch buzzwords are used by more than one percent of my connections. Interestingly, their English equivalents are slightly more prevalent. 87% of my connections are completely buzzword-free. For what it’s worth, people who use buzzwords also tend to have more connections.

Full disclosure: I may have used the word «strategic» in my own profile.

Update 21 Dec - Don’t push it, Linkedin.

Incidentally, 436,567 people, that’s less than 0.17% of all the 259m Linkedin users. Not that impressive.

Method

I used these scripts (in part adapted from Matthew Russell’s Mining the Social Web) to get the «summaries» and «specialties» of connections from the Linkedin Api and process them.