It’s easy enough to set up a LinkedIn Group. Click the little green plus sign, think of a name, type in a few words about what you would like to discuss and hit ‘create’. Simple. Setting up a successful LinkedIn Group, however, is a very different matter.
Most marketing professionals now understand that running a popular LinkedIn Group can be a powerful asset for the business, helping to establish thought leadership and enhancing visibility, credibility and reach. LinkedIn’s recent opening up of Group conversations has only made the proposition more compelling: increasingly accessible and searchable, the content you produce and curate can now reach even more people.
But, with nearly 900,000 groups already out there, how do you make sure your group is used, useful and unique – a social hub, not an island? Stuart Morgan, Digital Marketing Director at Marketing Options International, offers his five first steps for giving your LinkedIn Group the best start in life, and for nurturing it towards its full potential.
1. Find your niche. If your group is going to stand out from the crowd it needs a unique focus, and one that’s of interest to your target members. With this in mind, it’s vital to research existing groups related to your subject. Search using keywords, find out who’s already holding discussions in your area, what their agenda is, and how it relates to yours. Once you’ve identified your closest peer groups, join them yourself and monitor their content until you know exactly what gap your group is going to fill.
2. Get support. If your group is going to need input or resources from your senior executives, getting their buy-In and endorsement internally will be crucial to your group’s chance of success. Be ready to make a business case including cost/impact analysis, and to set a goal by which to mark the project’s success, such as a target number of members by a given date. In addition to the support of your executives, you’ll need the backing of a strong, interested team of Group Managers – volunteers from key stakeholder groups, committed to contributing and adding value to discussions. It’s a safe bet that this is a whole lot easier when you’ve got backing from above.
3. Plan ahead. Know the discussions that you want to start in advance, but also keep an eye on news of developing market trends. If conversation dries up, you should always have something topical in reserve to get it flowing again. Don’t, however, limit your planning to content: to take full advantage of the opportunities created by your group, it’s important to develop relationship-building strategies too, detailing (for example) how you might invite members into one-to-one or offline discussions.
4. Get noticed. Tell people about your group – by email, LinkedIn Advertising and InMail, company blogs, Facebook Pages and Twitter feeds. Make sure you and your Group Managers regularly mention it in your status updates on LinkedIn and other social profiles. Feed tweets to the people who run other corporate Twitter profiles and Facebook pages.
5. Keep it up. As a Group Owner, you should be an active, interested presence, but never overbearing – you want to encourage discussion, not stifle it. Keep a constant track of your group’s growth and the prospects it creates. If you’ve won the backing of senior management, let them know how well the group is doing. Give support to your Group Managers when they need it, and don’t forget to keep the conversation alive.
One final piece of advice. Don’t underestimate the importance of Step 1. For your group to be a success its members must want to participate in the discussion – and for this to happen, the group needs to be a valuable, unique resource. So, find that need and satisfy it. Give your members a place to speak, and some of the positive talk is sure to be about you.
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