In a nutshell, Public professional networks profiles are profiles that any individual can view without being logged into professional networks. Private profiles are profiles you see when you are logged into professional networks.Public professional networks profiles have less information.This article will break down what exactly is missing and what is different. And also some workarounds to some common limitations of public professional networks profiles.
Public user profiles Private user profiles
No skills information Has skills information
Has language, but no language proficiency Has language, and proficiency
No connection count Has total connection count
Does not have contact information, social media, and websites Have contact information, social media, and websites if you are a first-level connection if the profile user has that added into their profile.
Limited to 10 work experiences Work experiences are not limited.
Not every profile has a public profile (approximate 5% of user profiles do not have public profiles) Cannot visit all private profiles unless within 2nd order of connections (I might argue it is worst than public profiles)
Profile pictures might be hidden due to privacy setting Profile pictures are always available as long as you are within two orders of connections
Some parts of the public profile might be hidden (such as experiences, education, profile summary, etc) Full profile is always available as long as you are within two orders of connections
Activities shown on a public profile is limited to articles posted and summaries of the user's activities such as likes, etc. There are also no timestamps for public activities. Activities shown on a private profile show the full activity such as the actual content, comment, etc.
Can be scraped. Legal precedence has been tested in court. Cannot be scraped. See the platform suing a vendor that was scraping private profiles.
Enrich Layer API enriches professional networks Profile URLs with public profiles only when our users often come to me asking for workarounds when they experience the limitations of public user profiles.
There are three common complaints about public profiles, and we have workarounds for them. The problems are:
Enrich Layer API can append skill (keyword) data to public user profiles with the ` parameter. These data are sourced externally via public datasets. Therefore, the skill data we return might not match the skills listed on the user's private profile, but it is the best approximation.In this python code example, I will show you how to enrich a public professional networks profile with skills information with our Person Profile Endpoint.
`from pprint import pprint import requests
API_ # get your api key from = requests.get(' platform', "url": "https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/in/siow-shi-jia-450917144/", "skills": "include", }, pprint(response.json()) ` This is how the response with skills look like:
\{ ... "skills":[ "adobe photoshop", "css", "html5", "javascript", "php" ], ... \}
Enrich Layer API can append
to 400+M profiles in the platform. A match rate that exceeds what the platform has to offer even with private profiles. And with greater detail and accuracy.
We can out-perform the platform when it comes to matching contact information by correlating user profiles with external publicly available sources of contact information. For more information on how to fetch contact information of public user profiles, check out Enrich Layer's Contact API.
Like contact information, Enrich Layer API can pair public user profiles with Facebook, Twitter, and Github profile IDs.
We pair these data with publicly available sources and have significant coverage. Again, with a match rate that exceeds what the platform has to offer.
Enrich Layer API can append social media profiles to public user profiles with the ` parameter.
In this python code example, I will show you how you can append social media data to a public professional networks profile with Enrich Layer's Person Profile Endpoint.
The chances are that you chanced upon this article because you are looking to scrape user profiles for commercial or research purposes. And there brings the single biggest difference between public and private user profiles.
Scraping public user profiles has been legally tested in court. Therefore, it is safe to assume that it is safe to scrape public user profiles.
On the flipside, Mantheos Pte Ltd and its founders have been known to scrape private user profiles are now being sued in federal courts for multiple charges, including fraud.
It is wise to keep just scraping public user profiles for your needs to make sure you stay on the right side of the law.
Once you decide to ingest public user profiles for your use-case, you will soon learn that it is a nightmare to scrape user profiles. It would help if you had fresh residential proxies and sophisticated web crawlers, both expensive and complex to acquire and manage. Once you go down this rabbit hole, the problem becomes how I can get to public profile data without the complexity of building a dedicated web scraping team.
Enrich Layer can help your organization once you get to this stage. Our API lets you build data-driven applications. For example, we have a Person Profile Endpoint which takes a professional networks profile URL and enriches it with fresh profile data in a structured format.
Alternatively, for companies with a larger budget that want to skip API enrichment entirely and work with bulk profile datasets directly, we have LinkDB snapshots that offer exhaustive public profiles for use in Machine Learning (ML) models or be used within your product.
If you are unsure, send us an email at [email protected], and we will be happy to assist you in powering your data-driven application.
