Why You Should Create Your Own LinkedIn Group

Recently we’ve partnered with LinkedIn trainers, Marshall Walker to widen our social media offering. As part of this relationship, we have co-created our own LinkedIn Group. One main reason is because of the change in the way social media is being used. Referral traffic and organic reach have dropped due to algorithm changes, particularly with Facebook. Small businesses are now looking for alternative ways to market their brand, one such way is closed communities such as Facebook and LinkedIn groups.We are in the very early stages of our group but here are our findings so far:

Unlisted Group
In order for us to control who joins the group, we’ve set it up for the time-being as an unlisted group. It will stop spammers from taking over and we can keep an eye on who might be a competitor.

Content
We will be sharing content, tips, info on new features on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Our aim is to share our expertise and we are hoping that we establish ourselves as the go-to people.

Before we start inviting people to our group, we will be building the content up over a couple of weeks. This is so that there is enough content to keep the invitees engaged.

LinkedIn groupsAs the content needs to spark conversation, we will try a number of posting format ideas including:

  • Asking members’ experience of something
  • Survey questions
  • Sharing our own content (blogs) and highlighting the key points
  • Inviting members to ask questions that we can answer
  • Utilise LinkedIn live (live broadcasting)
  • Share recordings of webinars or “how to” videos

Time
It doesn’t have to take a huge chunk of your time administering a LinkedIn group. However you will probably need to work out a rota on which days you will monitor and engage with the posts. Preparation is key. We will be working through our existing content (blogs most likely) to pull out nuggets of wisdom that we can then share with the group. This can be prepared in advance and scheduled in a social media dashboard.

Invites
A group is only going to work if you have members. We will be inviting our LinkedIn connections to join our group and then when we make new connections we can include an invitation in our message to them too.
Other inventive ways to grow the group can include:

  • Put a message on your email footer
  • Put a post out on your other social media channels to see who might be interested
  • When networking, mention the group and then when you follow up with them, send an invite

We particularly like this article by Buffer that gives a good step-by-step guide into setting up a LinkedIn group and some good examples of what a successful LinkedIn group looks like. Remember it’s not about the numbers but good content and interaction.

We’ll be updating you on our progress but we are interested to hear if you’ve set up a LinkedIn group. Did it work for you?

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