LinkedIn groups.
So here's my best practices recommendations for LinkedIn groups today.
Number one, join LinkedIn groups where your target audience may hang out, where they may be.
Don't duplicate your personal content or your LinkedIn company page content in LinkedIn groups.
Now, maybe it's okay every now and then to share a company page post into a group or share your LinkedIn
personal profile posts in the LinkedIn group.
But you'll get greater value if you use that area of LinkedIn to put original content, write your own
stuff.
It doesn't always need to be grandiose.
It's a group.
Groups are not about big conversations, they're about short conversations.
So maybe it's a simple post every now and then.
If you're in a LinkedIn group and you discover it's irrelevant or dead, leave, don't overthink this.
Pay attention to the group members because ideally you're in a group where your target audience or their
influencers are.
So do some research on who these members are.
You can if you're using the sales navigator, you can really dig into them.
You can bring up their whole profile.
But you're going to want to look at the group members in whether you're a sales navigator or LinkedIn
and understand who they are.
Are they highly relevant to you?
Who is that person?
Maybe that's someone I need to know.
Maybe it's someone that I can help.
Maybe that's someone who can help someone else so I can introduce them.
And if you're in groups again same rule applies.
Engage on relevant content.
And I recommend you engage more often than posting because conversations that are trying to get started,
well, they're not getting started because no one is engaging on them, which is one of the downfalls
of LinkedIn groups today.
But when you see content that's relevant to you and more relevant to your target audience and LinkedIn
group, engage on it.
Jump into the conversation.
That person who posted it could very well be someone who could help you get a conversation with the
right person.
And invite your target audience to join LinkedIn groups.
There's not a lot of people do this, but if you find a group to be really informative or useful, which
by the way is unusual but not impossible, then invite your target audience to be a part of it.
Invite your favorite client who's relevant to that group conversation to be a part of it.
Bring other people to the party.
Use the messaging feature of LinkedIn groups to engage directly with relevant members.
This is a well unknown tactic that is in LinkedIn groups.
You can engage with anybody in the group even if you're not connected with them.
So you go look at the group members and you can look at all the members.
You can search only by name and you can find a member and then you can message them from within the
group.
Now they're going to get a message request that they have to accept.
But at that message is about that group and about what you read in that group, but relevant to that
target audience you're not yet connected with.
And if they are actively using LinkedIn, a lot of pieces of the line there, then they're likely to
respond to you when all those little pieces have to align for it to work.
Number eight, engage directly to the group members who have shown up with the content.
So other members are engaging on content or other members of shared content then engage with them directly,
pull them into the conversation, whatever you can do again to amplify that conversation and make it
more meaningful for everybody who's a part of that group.
Read the group rules.
You need to play nice so that you're not perceived as someone who's irrelevant or rude or kicked out
of the group.
The last group best practices don't create a LinkedIn group unless you plan to invest the time to grow
it and manage it and make it meaningful for your target audience.
I like LinkedIn groups to a certain extent.
I think they have become less important over time because they become less effective, but I wouldn't
ignore them completely.
I would only find groups that are highly relevant to have some conversations going on where your target
audience is in attendance.
And those are the groups I have to focus on.