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Effectively Managing your LinkedIn Group

Effectively Managing your LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn Groups can serve as a powerful tool to get connected with other business people. By using such groups, you can:

  • make your target markets more aware about your business
  • cultivate helpful industry relationships
  • position your company and/or yourself as an industry thought leader
  • display and highlight your unique thought leadership content
  • encourage inquiries for your company by generating interest, and
  • convert group members to subscribers, who will advocate your brand

However, many people make the mistake of simply launching a group and then abandoning it after a few weeks or months. You should remember that after you launch a group, you would need to manage it successfully to make the most of it. Here are some tips that can help you do just that:

Deciding on your Group Name and description: This is the first step towards attracting the right members. To ensure that your group is indexed by Google and displayed in LinkedIn group searches, you should use relevant keywords in the group “title” (which has approximately 48 characters) and description (the first 140 characters of which usually show up in search results). 

Setting a policy for your Group: Your group should have a clear objective and policy in place to invite members whom you believe could benefit the group and vice versa. While your invitation should outline what the group intends to do, your welcome message to the new members of the group can summarize the rules. You should manually approve every registration, and let your welcome message state how members can use the group, contact/interact with you etc. Once you have laid down the group rules, you should emphasize these rules from time to time, especially as your Manager’s Choice discussion. Unless you manage your group with a tight fist, it may be overtaken by spam, thus driving members away as no one welcome spam.

Managing the Group: You should scan the group activity regularly to find who are actively participating in the group, and note those who have a tendency to post topics that are a bit obstreperous. While encouraging active users, who could eventually act as a catalyst to your thriving group, you should watch those closely who have a tendency of posting off-topic subjects, or create trouble. While some aggressive views, which don’t openly attack someone, can be beneficial for stimulating the community, those spamming the group or posting about unrelated matters should be handled strictly with a warning or in severe cases, by removing them from the group.  You can also manage your LinkedIn contacts by using LinkedIn tools.

Moderating posts: Giving your members a free hand in everything could wreak havoc, as you never know who’s going to post what. So, moderating posts is a good idea to ensure quality and on-topic discussions. Even where don’t you choose to pre-approve posts/discussions prior to them being posted, you may keep an eye on the posted discussions strictly to ensure that they are in line with your group’s policy. Though most business owners are against letting their direct competitors post in their LinkedIn groups, you may assess if there’s any benefit to such a move, especially where your competitor has a well-managed and related LinkedIn group. However, you should exercise caution as you never know if your competitor is just interested in gaining exposure to your group’s members for its marketing purposes and not much concerned about your group’s well-being!

Share and Promote: Starting from sharing new features that get added to LinkedIn via LinkedIn Group Announcements and showing how to use them the best, to letting users showcase their talents, if relevant to the group’s goals, you can gain the trust of members and encourage others to join. You should promote your group via your website, other social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook etc). You can also create a badge for your group’s users and ask them to display it on their blogs/websites etc, which would be directly linked to your LinkedIn group’s url.  

Being the leaders and showing the path: If you are a small business owner, you should be the face of your LinkedIn group. In case you own an enterprise, you should appoint a spokesperson who can interact with the group and act as the group’s face. To lead your group, various activities can be used like posting weekly discussion topics/ weekly questions, posting comment on existing discussions (which usually create further activity on the thread), asking for feedbacks from group members on specific subjects/posts, running polls within the group etc.

Though the above points are just a few elementary ways of managing LinkedIn groups, they can help you get started. So, use them and learn on your own by browsing LinkedIn Help Center and other useful sites to get insight into other modes of managing your LinkedIn group well.