What LinkedIn Groups Can Do For Your Business

August 7, 2014: We’ve written before about the business advantages of using LinkedIn, and hope you’ve downloaded our free e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Marketing on LinkedIn. Today we want to talk about LinkedIn Groups, because they provide businesses with an opportunity to participate and engage with members of this powerful social network in a way that bypasses some of the service’s ordinary restrictions against contacting someone you don’t know well. For this reason alone businesses seeking to make an impact on the service should be using Groups.

But Groups provide many other benefits as well. Groups let business leaders distinguish themselves by sharing intelligence, answering questions from peers, posting relevant links, and commenting on important industry discussions.

Groups let businesses:

1. Show thought leadership by sharing content and commenting on topical posts in the group. 

Your business stands for something, and Groups provide a way to distinguish yourself both as an expert and as an advocate for your business values. While Groups aren’t a place to advertise your services directly, your active participation in them can gain attention (and connections) and create real brand equity in a way similar to the way that brand equity is created by sponsoring a business event or conference. Active participation in a LinkedIn Group can show that a business executive cares about issues of common industry concern, and give a business a voice and a personality that can set it above competitors unwilling to engage at this level.

2. Connect with peers in a way that may be instrumental to a business conversation. 

Unless you’re participating in Groups, the options that LinkedIn gives you to connect with people with whom you currently have no direct connection is limited. Sure, you can send inMails to such people, but unless you’ve got a paid account, you will run out of your inMail allowance very quickly. But as long as you’re in the same group as the person you’re seeking to connect with, you can freely request a connection. And unlike a “cold” invitation to connect via inMail, connections you seek to make in a group are “warmed up” by conversations you’ve already engaged in with your connection target, a fact that makes an invitation acceptance more likely.  Furthermore, people who appreciate what you have to write may want to spontaneously connect with you. This is a great way to organically grow your list of LinkedIn business connections.

3. Develop insights into the pressing issues in your industry by participating in relevant conversations. 

Engaging with members of your business community can produce intelligence about your market, your competitors, and other issues that might not otherwise be surfaced. While you no longer conduct polls directly within LinkedIn Groups, you can still link out to 3rd party polling applications to gather data on matters of industry concern. The insights you develop from querying your business peers can be especially useful when developing your own original, data-driven content for your blog or other publishing outlet.

What to look for in a LinkedIn Group

Your ideal target set consists of LinkedIn Groups that are relevant to your industry, have a healthy stream of conversational streams happening, whose members consist of people likely to include either prospective customers or others who have an influence on such people. There are likely to be a number of groups — perhaps even a very large number — active in your business vertical, and at first blush these groups might look very similar. In operation, however, they may work very differently, and the actual business value they deliver to you may vary widely.

For example, some groups may have very loose moderation policies, while others may be tightly policed by the moderator(s). Others may be dominated by one or two voices, whereas others may have broader-based participation from their members. Until you actually join a group and spend time in the conversational trenches, it’s impossible to definitively determine whether your experience will be rewarding or frustrating. But you can save a lot of such trial and error by doing advance due diligence using LinkedIn’s tools for identifying suitable groups for you.

In a forthcoming article and free e-book, we’ll take you this process in a step-by-step manner.

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