LinkedIn has many uses for businesses, from promotion and PR to targeting potential customers. One feature of LinkedIn that I find to be still under-used are Groups. Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people have joined Groups, but they are not using them to their full potential.
If your business has a blog or posts articles, you should be joining groups with people who would be interested in what your company does and sharing your blogs with the group. This puts you in front of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands (in large groups) of professionals and gives you the ability to establish yourself as an expert in your field/industry.
Once in a group, there a few ways to really participate. For right now, I’ll be focusing on “News” and “Discussions” and will post a follow-up on how to exactly do these soon.
News: You can take an article or blog post and put it into the Group(s) you are in. The article will display in the email-blast that group members receive under the section called “Latest Updates”, as well as under the “News” tab of the Group Page. It will show the title, the first 250 characters of the post and the source, which would be either the name of your blog or your company. Posting articles in this way is a little more formal than Discussions, although people can still respond to your article.
Discussions: If you are writing about a topic that you think the people in your groups would want to talk about, post it as a Discussion. Discussions are great because they really foster a back-and-forth kind of communication, as LinkedIn automatically emails participants other peoples’ comments (this feature can be disabled). The value in this is great; you get to continue to jump in and respond to what others are saying and every time you do, the discussion goes to the top of the Discussion section in the Group Page as the most recent. Additionally, someone may leave a comment, but come back as they see the discussion is ongoing.
Both are great ways to communicate and promote yourself and your business. You get to be hosting a discussion and/or sharing important information with members of the Group, establishing yourself as an expert, and as a reliable, quality source of information. I fear Groups will soon be consumed with spammers and the larger ones are already showing signs of this…so get involved now and take advantage while you can!
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This is pretty much why I don’t like to join groups on LinkedIn. Or Facebook. And it’s the most common reason I unfollow people on Twitter: incessant, in-your-face marketing with no other content.
A lot of people–I would even go so far as to say most people–don’t like intrusive marketing. We don’t like it on Twitter, we don’t like it on LinkedIn, and, speaking for myself, if any group I’m in on LinkedIn starts becoming more than a smattering of this kind of thing, I leave it.
You seem to get this in in your last statement: I fear Groups will soon be consumed with spammers and the larger ones are already showing signs of this…so get involved now and take advantage while you can!
What is spamming if not unsolicited advertising of the exact kind that you’re touting?
Vmarketingblog is “touting” the importance of these groups on on various social networks, such as LinkedIn. I think you need to really read what she wrote because you really missed the point.
Pay attention: Right from the beginning vmarketingblog writes people are not using them to their full potential. What I took from this is there are a lot of opportunities people can receive from these groups like free information.
The concern is spammers making it more difficult to receive some of this valuable information because they are constantly posting nonsense. For example, one might think your comment is spam because it is not relating to the conversation, in fact you posted a link to your own twitter page so tell me, what “unsolicited advertising of the exact kind that you touting?” dear!
While you are figuring that out follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/MackleenStories