Influence of First Steps in a Community on Ego-Network: Growth, Diversity, and Engagement

Social networks are important in our offline and online life. In particular, networks that people form within certain communities can be critical for their engagement and growth in those communities. In this work, we analyze the growth of ego-networks for new employees of companies in LinkedIn, and study how the pattern of network formation in a company affects one’s growth and engagement in the company. We first identify some key common patterns – such as functional group preference and triad-closing propagation – in the network formation within the company. We find that because of these common patterns initial connections that people make in new organizations become crucial. To be specific, our analysis demonstrates that first few connections in a newly joined company have great impact on characterizing future status in the company, which includes the total number of connections, network diversity, and retention.