LinkedIn Groups Best Practices & How to Join

This is a quick how-to on Joining LinkedIn Groups.

Fact: Any person using LinkedIn can join 50 groups whether they pay or not.

3 Steps to Finding the Most Effective LinkedIn Groups

1) What’re your key goals & key target people?

When searching for groups, think about your goal.

Typically, there are two overall goals everyone has when they join groups.

First, they want visibility and second, they want to connect with key people.

A third reason may be for reading content posted in groups.

For me its everything legal and lawyer/attorney related.

2) Select your keywords related to your goals and key people.

Keywords matter in LinkedIn.

Their spelling matters and the suffix matters.

LinkedIn discriminates based on suffixes.

If you type attorney or attorneys, it matters.

If you type recruit or recruiting, it matters.

When searching for groups, correct spelling and word choice matters if

you find the groups that are present in LinkedIn.

3) Search for groups these people may be in.

There are all kinds of groups. LinkedIn is the most professional of

business social media platforms. So the groups will have more

business language associated with the group names vs. Facebook’s

casual group names.

There is all kinds of groups.

There are job related groups, location specific groups, alumni groups, industry specific groups, networking groups,

trade specialization groups, company specific groups, skill & qualification groups, membership & organization groups,

special interest groups, etc.

You get the point.

2 Best Practices when Joining LinkedIn Groups

When you join groups, be sure to:

(See #5 below)

1) Adjust the amount of e-mail you will receive from groups. It can be overwhelming.

2) Adjust the amount of group logos you display on your profile.

How to Join Groups

1) Getting to the LinkedIn Groups page

Go to the Interests drop-down menu at the top of the LinkedIn browser bar and select Groups.

2) Find a Group

On the Groups Page, find the button “Find a group” and click it.

3) Search for the groups you want to join.

When you find a group, click join.

4) Adjust your group settings

Some groups require approval, if your group does you’ll see this message “Your request to join…” will appear. If no approval is required, you will go straight to the group. In either case you will have the option to “Adjust your settings”.

You want to do this. Groups produce copious amounts of e-mail, and you will want to curb the amount you receive to only essential.

5) Adjusting Your Group Settings

Most of these settings are self-explanatory but let me suggest some best practices:

You want to minimize the excess e-mail groups produce.

1) Group Logo

You really only want to display about 6 groups on your profile. Your profile is a statement about you to the world and your target audience. Consider wisely what group logos you choose to display.

2) E-mail

Groups can send you a lot of e-mail. Especially if you join 50 groups. Consider what e-mail you want that to go to.

3) Posts

Unless you want to heavily monitor the activity in a group, only in extreme cases do I suggest selecting this option.

4) Digest Email

Again only in extreme cases would I select using the Daily digest email option. For a couple of my groups, I choose the weekly digest email option. Most of my groups I do not get any emails on group activity. Its simply too much information to review.

5) Announcements

Because I only get an announcement per week per group, I generally keep this option selected. Most groups do not send announcements.

6) Messages

I usually let members of a group send me messages. I do not find many people using this option and in most cases when they do contact me its for useful business purposes.

How to join LinkedIn Groups & Best Practices