Right so you have a decent LinkedIn profile, you have connected to a few people but you’re looking to get more out of LinkedIn. What should you do? One obvious place to start is checking out the groups section, which is essentially discussion forums hosted on LinkedIn.
Stats
Groups aren’t new to LinkedIn, in fact they’ve been around for ages and there are now no less than 2 million of them and 200 conversations happening every minute – catering to most people, industries, sectors and so forth. People that engage on posts and do updates in groups have on average 4 times as many profile views.
Benefits of joining groups
The benefit of joining groups are manifold, for starters you can learn from other professionals and share challenges, best practise and so on. Furthermore, by joining a group by default you will be able to connect with everyone in that that group and even send messages without being first level connections. You can find all the group members in searches and of course, they can find you – so it’s a great way of increasing your exposure and driving traffic to your profile no matter what your objective is on LinkedIn.
To give you an example, here’s a group called Linked:HR which has over 900,000 members, mostly HR and recruiting people which is great if you happen to be a recruiter or a job seeker – they can now find you much easier on LinkedIn.
Where do you begin?
You can start with checking out the directory and tap in your keywords to get suggestions of groups relevant for you. When you find a group that looks interesting, have a look at activity, number of members and even other stats before you join. The typical signs of a healthy group will be lots of comments and discussions, not so many links and definitely no spam.
The average LinkedIn member joins 7 groups and you can actually join up to 50 groups (most recruiters & sales people do) but I can tell you now that you won’t be able to stay on top of that many groups so a good rule of thumb is to join 10 groups, be active in 3 and consider starting one yourself.
Lots of groups out there
Over 8,000 groups are started every week and it’s rather competitive out there, my recommendation would be to only start a group if there is a gap in the market or if you know you can do it better than the existing ones.
Here at Link Humans, we manage 3 groups (Undercover Recruiter, Social Media London & Personal Branding UK) and they are excellent marketing tools for us as an agency. Hope to see you in one of them soon!
Get in touch
Any other LinkedIn or social media questions, please get in touch by tweeting us @linkhumans!
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