How to Establish and Manage a LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn remains one of the most effective social media channels for business. You may realize that it is important for your business to be active on LinkedIn; however, you may not understand just how involved you need to be and how to make all of the moving parts work.

The importance of LinkedIn groups

You may or may not know that using LinkedIn groups as a way to spread your content is an extremely sensible and effective thing to do. LinkedIn allows you to be a member of 50 groups as part of its basic service (with no fee involved). If you choose to pay for premium service, you will be able to be involved with even more groups than that. If you have researched the relevant groups that exist on LinkedIn in your niche and you haven’t found the perfect group for your needs, you may wish to consider establishing a new group and inviting other people to join. After you clearly understand how LinkedIn groups work, you should consider launching your own group on LinkedIn.

The reason for launching a LinkedIn group

Before you launch your own LinkedIn group, you should understand exactly what you feel you want to get out of that group and build the foundation accordingly. Some of your reasons for establishing the group may be:

• Building awareness and establishing relationships with your target audience
• Establishing yourself and your company as a leader in your niche
• Protecting important relationships in your niche
• Highlighting your valuable content
• Buidling interest in what you do and what you are offering
• Build loyal followers
• Building thought leadership
• Bringing your online communities together

There are many different justifiable reasons to launch your own LinkedIn group. Once you have decided to do so, the following will help you to establish that group:

• Carefully think about your group’s name and description: The name that you choose for your group as well as the description that you write for your group are both extremely important when it comes to attracting other people. You need to make sure to use effective keywords and key phrases so that they will both appear in group searches. You will want to use terminology that interests people in choosing to learn more about what you do.

• Establish a firm policy: It is very important for you to establish a set of rules that the group should follow. It is very important to have set guidelines. However, it is important to remember that there will be members of your group who don’t follow the rules. Before you accept anyone into your group, they will need to state that they have read your rules and agree with them. Your group will run smoothly if people agree to cooperate.

• Monitor new members and comments: It is very important that you watch what is being said and who is saying it. If you can establish control over that, your group has a chance of becoming successful and of growing effectively. It is important to screen potential group members carefully before you approve them for the group. It is important to keep in mind that you need to do this for your own good as well as for the good of the group. An effective mix of group members is very important for the group’s success.

• Make use of the tools that are offered by LinkedIn groups: LinkedIn groups offers all sorts of useful tools that you can take advantage of for the group. One of those tools is the Announcements feature, which will allow you to send a maximum of one announcement a week directly to the Email addresses of your group’s members. You don’t have to limit your group to interactions in the form of comments and questions. You can conduct webinars, offer white papers and newsletters, and give them other useful pieces of information.

• Be the leader of the group: It is important, once you have established your group, to lead the group effectively. It isn’t enough simply to establish the group. If you can’t or don’t want to lead the group for some reason, you need to make sure to delegate that to someone else. Every body needs a head. At the very least, you need to participate in group discussions but you should try to be more involved than that, if possible.

Conclusion

No doubt, you are a member of several groups on LinkedIn. Launching your own group gives you the opportunity to have some control over the success of the group. You will be in a position of being able to make decisions that will greatly contribute to the success of the group and people will be appreciative. Always remember that one of your main objectives when it comes to launching a LinkedIn group is to continue to add value and to provide valuable, useful, informative information to your group’s members.