LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn was created for business professionals to communicate within a trusted network. These discussions happen within LinkedIn groups and fuel most of the interaction across the whole site. LinkedIn Groups opens a world of possibilities and allows you to accomplish several business activities. Your personal profile allows you to join and display up to 50 groups that you belong to, which you can use as a way to demonstrate your areas of expertise.

Groups can either be open or closed. If you join an open group you immediately become a member.

Open groups are important because they allow search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo) to index the content displayed in those groups (content in closed groups does not get indexed). Closed groups are good for controlled content, membership oriented groups/associations, or even alumni networks that require you to have actually attended a specific school. These closed groups also allow you to capture emails if you are the group administrator (this will be discussed further under the category of owning a group). Overall, groups are an important strategy to attract industry professionals to a specific topic and use as a marketing vehicle.

Join, Introduce, Participate

You can identify relevant LinkedIn Groups via keyword search. Joining larger groups is always a good idea, because it means your posts will have a larger reach. However, larger groups may mean that interactions may not be as valuable when it comes to building a business relationship. Whenever you join a new group be sure to introduce yourself with a discussion post. Let the group know why you have joined the group, what your professional interests are, and request a connection. Be careful not to be too self-promotional or sales-oriented. Provide useful or educational information and let the user decide whether to contact you. The number one rule behind any social media interaction is to give value, then ask for value in return. As an example, before you ask for people to sign up for and attend your webcast, be sure to post articles and comment on discussions happening within the group.

Build your Network through Groups

Some people are inherently social and have no issues with increasing the size of the LinkedIn network because they have so many contacts outside of LinkedIn before they joined the site. For those who don’t have a large network of connections, LinkedIn allows us to network with anyone in the entire world at the click of a button. LinkedIn limits your ability to connect with someone by forcing you to tell them how you know them. Groups give you the bridge to connect with someone that you may not have a previous connection with. If you are within any group you belong to, you have the ability to look at the members’ list. Within that list, you can see who you are already connected with, and those who you are not yet connected to. You can request a connection with anyone in that group by going to group member profiles, click on “invite to connect”, then select Groups, and what group you would like to connect with them through (you may belong to multiple groups with one person). If you already have joined your maximum of 50 groups, you can leave a (e.g. smaller) group and join another and continue to grow your network with the steps above.

LinkedIn Group Administration

Understanding how to start and manage a group yields several opportunities for the person who is the group administrator. Content control and management falls onto their shoulders, and if someone is abusing the group guidelines or policies the administrator can remove their post, and even remove them from the group if the post was egregious. As group administrator you capture everyone’s emails who joins the group (if it is a closed group; if it is open you do not receive their email information). If the group is branded, or covers industry or company relevant content it will show up in Google results (if the group is an open group). Lastly, owning a group showcases your industry expertise and elevates you to be seen as a subject matter expert within your network on LinkedIn.

We certainly hope these two blogs have helped you generate ideas on next steps for improving your LinkedIn presence on the web in integrating your personal profile with your Company page. Be sure to share your experiences on leveraging LinkedIn groups below and retweet, facebook like and share this post with your colleagues.