The one place you can find everyone – recruiters, influencers, potential networking connections and prospective clients – is within LinkedIn Groups. Known for their strong focus, Groups provide a unique way for you to become visible, known and trusted – without members even being connections.
You can:
- Give and get feedback
- Ask questions
- Answer questions
- Present offers
- Share resources
- Invite people to share your content and visit your site
And best of all – monitor the response you get to all of the above.
You can also share links freely with Groups – but don’t use this as an excuse to spam. Always make sure that any links you share are highly relevant, timely and interesting, with a clear purpose for sharing.
LinkedIn has done away with the ability to create polls for Groups, but you can now perform some actions that weren’t approved before: Namely…
- Post job discussions and promotions
- Flag or delete posts according to Discussion Types
(If in doubt as to what you can and can’t do, check out Changes to Groups Format in the Help section.)
Used regularly, consistently and wisely – with a clear goal in mind – LinkedIn’s Groups feature remains one of the best arenas in which to conduct business research.
When you join the right Group, you can use it to check out:
- Areas of the common Group interest that its members are having trouble with
- Gaps in available resources and products
- Resources or products currently available
- Complaints about competitors, or existing products or services
- Complaints about lack of products or services currently available
- Brainstorming sessions and ideas
- Community culture
- Industry or niche influencers
- Competitors
So how do you know which Groups to join?
Get into the habit of scrolling down LinkedIn’s right-hand, vertical sidebar. That’s where you’ll find suggestions tailored to your Profile – including “Groups You May Like”.
In addition…
1. Make a commitment to spend time daily monitoring or interacting with your Group or Groups.
2. Decide how many Groups to join.
3. Find Groups that are active, with ongoing discussions and dialogues.
4. Avoid Groups that are too big (over 1,000 members) or too small.
Taking these simple steps ensures you’ll create maximum visibility and interaction – which in turn will impact your searchability when others research you. Successful Group participation also creates trust and shows you without any need for third-party apps or stats who to follow – and learn from.
Hi Nicole,
LinkedIn groups are an absolutely great resource and one of the first I used when starting out on the Web. That being said, there is sometimes a conflict between #3 and #4 on your list. Sometimes smaller groups just aren’t that active and can’t give you the response you need to make using them worthwhile. I’m wondering. If you had a choice between a very large but active and focused group and a smaller one that was frankly just not as active, which would you choose. I’d love if we could start a discussion thread on this topic in the BizSugar community. I’ve left a comment there under your post.
A large group is good for ‘watch and learn’, while a small group is better to start to make yourself known. You
are correct, users should avoid small groups with little activity. I
would choose the focused group (no matter the number of members).