To find Groups, you can “enter through the back door,” as I call it. From the LinkedIn main menu, select Work and then click on the Groups icon. If you aren’t a member of any Groups, LinkedIn will prompt you to Discover some Groups. If you already belong to some, you will see your most active Groups, as shown in Figure 13–2 below.
FIGURE 13–1. Search to Find Popular Groups
FIGURE 13–2. Accessing Your Groups
Notice many of the Groups seen in Figure 13–2 have a significant number of new conversations today (shown in the right-hand column). The post from the Information Security Community, on the left, has 53 likes and 10 comments in the first week of being posted. This is good news, and I have been seeing more interaction in Groups since LinkedIn announced in February 2018 that it was reintegrating Groups back into the core user experience. Groups are now accessible from the homepage on both desktop and mobile, and as I mentioned above, content shared in Groups may be soon appearing in the main newsfeed.
The new Groups on LinkedIn will feature improved communication tools, including the ability to @ mention other members in conversations (similar to how you would @ mention on Twitter). Whether group owners and managers will have expanded capabilities to monitor conversations remains to be seen at the time of this writing. Expanded content options in Groups, including native video, will also be available.
Evaluating Groups
To effectively use Groups, don’t just join the first one that looks interesting. When it comes to professional Groups on LinkedIn, there will usually be several options to choose from, and you need to research the available Groups to find the top three to five in a particular area. If you want to see a directory of every Group on LinkedIn, visit https://www.linkedin.com/groups/. Remember, there are approximately 2 million Groups on LinkedIn, so this directory may seem overwhelming, but it’s an easy way to get started.
First, make sure the Group is active. See how many members it has, and check out some of their profiles to see if you know any of them or would want to add them to your network. I believe it’s better to join a small Group with the right members than a very large one with people you wouldn’t want to connect to.
LinkedIn used to let you preview a Group’s discussions before asking to join, which was very useful. Today, you can only see the number of members, a brief description and statement of purpose, the admins, and any of your connections who are in the Group. You have to join the Group to evaluate the content and level of interaction then leave the Group if it’s not what you are looking for. Figure 13–3 on page 144 shows a snapshot of the Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group before asking to join.
This Group has 214,076 members. I personally know one of the admins and know all my connections who are in this Group (these are friends, not just LinkedIn connections I’ve never met). Since this is a large Group and I already know many people, it would be a good choice for me.
FIGURE 13–3. Details of the Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group
Joining a Group
When you find a Group you want to join, simply click on the Ask to Join button on the listing. A message like the one in Figure 13–4 below will appear, acknowledging your request.
FIGURE 13–4. Automated Response Message
In some cases, you may not be accepted to the Group if you don’t meet their membership criteria. For example, let’s say you are a marketer and request access to a group of chiropractors. Your goal as a marketer is to meet chiropractors to help them market their business, but the purpose of the Group is for chiropractors to network with each other. Your application to join the Group will probably be rejected.
If you are accepted into the Group, you can adjust your communications preferences by clicking on the three dots next to the group name in the top right corner of your page, then select Update for your settings. See Figure 13–5 on page 145 for your options.
FIGURE 13–5. Email Frequency Settings for Groups
Let’s briefly go through each option in Figure 13–5 above so you can optimally configure your group communication settings:
■ Messaging. You can allow or prevent other group members from messaging you if they are not 1st-degree connections.
■ Display Group on profile. You can choose whether or not to display this Group in your profile under Interests. I personally display all of my Groups in my profile. If you are actively looking for a new job and you join a job search Group, you can choose not to display this in your profile so your boss doesn’t notice.
■ Communications settings. The next two settings, Email for all groups and in-app notifications for all groups, will redirect you to your Communications settings under Settings & Privacy in your global settings. To reach these settings from the LinkedIn home page, select Me in the main menu. Next, select Settings & Privacy, Communications, Channels, Email Frequency, then Updates from your groups. Choose the Group you want to modify.
■ In-app notifications for all groups: There are three notification options you can turn on or off. You can be notified in your Notifications tab when your group membership has been approved, when you are invited by another LinkedIn member to join a group, or when posts are shared in a group you belong to. I recommend turning off all three of these notifications so your Notifications tab doesn’t get flooded with messages. You can always change the frequency of your Group updates as you see in Figure 13–6 on page 145.
Also choose whether you want to receive group announcements and if you want to be notified of new discussions. Once you save changes, you will be ready to participate (and receive approval from the group manager if it’s an Unlisted Group).
FIGURE 13–6. Global Email Frequency Settings for Groups
WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO USE GROUPS?
Visiting and following up on your Groups regularly is the only way to effectively use LinkedIn to build your professional network. You need to make frequent and regular appearances within your Group to maximize your exposure. One of the best ways to make sure you are seen is to target the most popular discussions and then be a regular and beneficial contributor to those discussions.
Once you feel comfortable with how a Group works, the next step is to start your own discussion. Choose a topic you are knowledgeable about so you can keep the conversation going. When you start a new discussion, you want it to be as engaging as possible. You can look at a few of the extended conversations in your Group and see how they started. Starting a discussion isn’t always about asking a question. You can ask for advice about a specific scenario or post information that would be useful to the target market you are looking to attract. Once you get the conversation started and others are joining in, be sure to reply in a timely fashion. This is when you can change your settings to the daily digest so you know when the conversations are active. Also check in on your discussion a few times a day so you can jump into the conversation when someone comments.
Visit your Groups regularly and participate whenever you can add value to a discussion and keep the conversation going. You can follow people in your Group if you find them interesting; after a while, you can invite them to join your network if you decide they are a good fit.
If you are interested in a particular discussion, you can like it. Your profile picture and a link to your profile will appear below the discussion, showing people you are interested in the topic.
COMMUNICATING WITH GROUP MEMBERS
You can send a message to a group member without being connected and adjust your Messaging settings from within the Group. Here are the rules you can read about on LinkedIn Help:
1. You can send 15 free private messages to fellow group members each month, inclusive of all Groups you are in. If you go over the limit, you’ll get an error message. This means you can’t send 15 messages to members of the Real Estate Crowdfunding group and 15 more messages to the Real Estate Investors group. You can only send 15 messages per month total.
■ Unsent messages don’t roll o
ver to the next month. Use it or lose it!
■ Only the original message counts toward the limit. Any follow-up replies from either party don’t count toward the 15-message allotment. Message conversations count as one message.
■ If you need to send more messages for recruiting, promoting, or connecting with members outside your network, LinkedIn offers many alternatives. Please check out the Premium accounts or Recruiter product options, which include InMail messages and recruiting tools to make the most of LinkedIn.
2. You have to be a member of a Group for at least four days. This is to prevent people from joining a Group and aggressively marketing immediately. The four-day waiting period allows the new member to see what the Group is talking about and get to know some of the members before reaching out through the Group. Of course, you can join a Group, invite a member to connect, and then send them messages through normal LinkedIn Messages.
3. You have to be a member of LinkedIn for at least 30 days in order to send messages to fellow Group members. Again, this prevents people from creating a brand-new LinkedIn account and messaging people in Groups immediately.
Follow these guidelines, and you should be in a good place to connect directly within a Group. But why be satisfied with joining a Group when you can start your own?
HOW TO START A GROUP
Before you start your own Group, you need to decide if you are willing to commit the time to make it a success. Starting a Group is easy, but growing it and keeping it active can take a lot of work, especially in the beginning. I highly recommend you create a team of people who can share in the management and promotion of your Group. As it grows, you can invite a few of the most active members to become Group managers. Most of them will feel honored by the invitation.
The topics you choose to focus on will determine how appealing your Group is and how many members will be interested in joining. Before starting your Group, you should research topics within your niche that generate interest and choose the top two or three as the basis for your Group. Don’t just create a carbon copy of exisiting Groups. Find a niche and focus your Group on the niche so you will attract targeted members.
When you start a new Group, you will need to create a profile and a description of the Group, including keywords that will help generate interest in it. Look at some popular LinkedIn Groups, and see how they worded their descriptions, which will help you determine what to say in your group description.
For example, here is the description for the Leadership Think Tank Group, which as of this writing has more than 282,000 members:
About this Group
Leadership Think Tank is a Community committed to collaborating for the improvement of leadership concepts and practices. Our world has entered a new era of relationship between leaders and followers, which very clearly calls for new leaders and a new brand of Leadership in Life and Business.
Gathering a successful community of people is not only helpful, it’s necessary to the pursuit of this goal.
So to guide you in this daunting task of picking the right people to join The Leadership Think Tank, I’m going to share with you a four-part checklist:
■ Number One: Your history. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has something to share. We want to learn from you.
■ Number Two: Your interest level. If you are interested in improving yourself and others, you are probably a good prospect. Sometimes people can fake their interest, but we have enough members who will be a able to judge whether you are merely pretending.
■ Number Three: Your responses. Response tells us a lot about someone’s integrity, character, and skills. A person’s responses are good indications of his or her character. Our attitudes reflect our inner selves, so even if we can fool others for a while, eventually our true selves will emerge.
■ Number Four: Your results. The name of the game is results. How else can we effectively judge an individual’s performance? The final judge must be results. So share yours!
Remember, building a good community will be one of our most challenging tasks, but it will bring multiple rewards for a long time to come.
As you see, they clearly state the purpose and vision of their community. They describe the perfect member of the Group and encourage members to invite other leaders to join the Group.
Group Settings
LinkedIn streamlined its Group settings and removed the moderation tools. Group settings options are shown in Figure 13–7. By clicking on the three dots next to each member’s name, the Group administrator or manager can connect with that member if they aren’t connected, promote them to manager status, or remove and/or block them from the Group if they are disruptive. There is no way to moderate content, but the administrator or manager can remove content and/or disable comments on a post.
FIGURE 13–7. Group Settings
In my experience, standard Groups with thousands of members can become unfocused if the group manager doesn’t participate actively. A good group manager can keep the Group focused by starting new discussions, featuring popular discussions that are relevant to the topic, and privately contacting members who are posting off-topic discussions. It also helps to have multiple managers for a large, standard Group.
Engaging Your Group with Focused Discussions
There are all sorts of ways to keep your Group active using discussions as a way to connect. For example, the discussions in product-related communities are amazingly focused and on topic. You don’t see many people asking questions about other Adobe products or competitors’ products in the Photoshop communities because the members are knowledgeable enough to keep the discussions focused. If someone does start a discussion that is not relevant to the Group, a group member or manager will often respond and suggest a better place to post that question. These Groups are often self-policing and self-supporting, which makes the community much stronger and more vibrant.
Unlisted Groups, on the other hand, are by nature smaller and more focused, since every member is manually approved by the group manager. You usually don’t have as many new discussions or comments, but the discussions are very focused. You also have a small community of experts who are very knowledgeable about specific products or topics.
Open Vs. Closed Groups
It’s up to you to decide if your Group will be open (standard) or closed (unlisted). You can start a standard Group and change it to unlisted or vice versa. Groups often start out open or closed and later decide to switch. Here are some questions that may help you decide how to structure your Group:
■ What is your Group’s purpose (e.g., building loyalty, providing support, networking)?
■ Is your product or service mainstream or is it a niche product/service?
■ How many members do you estimate your Group will have? If your company has 2,000 current customers, you wouldn’t expect your Group to have 10,000 members.
■ How many group managers will you have?
■ How many new discussions and comments per week do you expect?
■ How fast do you expect your Group to grow?
■ How will you promote your Group?
There are a lot of factors that come into play when deciding how to structure your Group, and it’s imperative to have a plan and a goal before you begin. Your reputation and your company’s reputation are on the line when you create a Group; if it’s unfocused or unmanaged, it will reflect poorly on you. Identify your Group’s purpose, allocate sufficient resources, and create a detailed plan so it will thrive and provide value to your company.
Promoting the Group
LinkedIn has removed the ability to promote your Group by sending mass messages. Now you have to manually promote it using status updates, running LinkedIn ads, or sending LinkedIn messages to your connections.
The best way to invite people to join is by sending an invitation with a personal message to let them know who you are and why you want them to join the Group.
It is acceptable to encourage your mem
bers to invite their friends to join if they use personalized messages. You can then approve or decline new invitations as you see fit.
If you want to grow your Group quickly, you can start promoting it via social media. You can tweet links to your Group, post an invitation on your Facebook wall, and blog about it. Encourage people to join and invite their friends. You can also run ads on LinkedIn to promote your Group. I’ll show you how to create effective LinkedIn ads in Chapters 20 and 21.
MANAGING THE GROUP
Consistent management is really the key to a strong Group. A good community manager will monitor, facilitate, and grow their Group.
I highly recommend creating rules for your Group and posting them under Group Rules and in a Featured Discussion in your LinkedIn Group. Establishing the guidelines for posting and displaying them prominently are easy ways to help new members get acquainted with your Group. Such guidelines generally provide users with community contacts, encourage them to post only relevant information, and specify conduct that can get them banned. (These usually include things like spamming, excessive self-promotion, abusing other members, and other rules that will keep your Group safe for all members.)
Here is an example of a well-crafted set of rules from Leadership Think Tank Group:
1. We hope the conversations that take place on Leadership Think Tank will be energetic, constructive, free-wheeling, and provocative. To make sure we all stay on-topic, posts might be reviewed by our editors.
2. We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines: No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.
3. It is our challenge to find good people to help us accomplish and make Leadership Think Tank a great place. So gathering the right people is not only helpful, but necessary.
Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business Page 14