Tips for Managing a LinkedIn Group by sagarganatra

Groups offer valuable networking opportunities for their participants, who gain access to resources and information that can be beneficial for their careers. If you are considering starting a LinkedIn group or want to increase the effectiveness or reach of your current group, the 8 tips below can help.

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1. Use a Personal Touch

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LinkedIn provides a wide range of tools that allow you to stay connected with your members in ways that feel personal. The Templates feature allows you to provide automatic responses to new members, and even to those requesting to join your group. It’s an easy way to envelope new members into your community. But you don’t have to limit yourself to early interactions.
Most members would be pleased to receive a note congratulating them on an accomplishment, or to read your comment on a discussion topic they started. As Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot observes, “LinkedIn groups are all about community and bringing people with common interests together.”
He should know: his group, OnStartups, is the fourth-largest on LinkedIn with a membership that exceeds 113,000.

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2. Lay Some Ground Rules

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Establishing posting guidelines and displaying them prominently (in a featured discussion) is an easy way to help new members get acquainted with your group. Such guidelines generally provide users with community contacts, encourage them to post information in appropriate sections, and specify conduct that can get them banned (spam or attacking other group members, for example).
Making everyone aware of the rules also gives you a reference point when you have to handle a difficult situation with a member.

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3. Praise the Good, Deal with the Bad

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Encourage member participation by praising and highlighting valuable contributions to the group. This incentivizes others to share their content and engage. If you encounter negative or counterproductive behavior from a member, it’s important to be professional and civil. Should it become necessary to issue a warning, handle the matter privately. Apart from unusually egregious behavior or spam, it’s also a good idea to give a member a warning or two before banning them from the group. Ultimately, it’s up to you to use your best judgment.

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4. Help Your Members Promote Themselves

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One of the biggest complaints about LinkedIn Groups is the number of people who join simply to promote themselves or their business — and then hijack the group discussion boards to do so. They usually aren’t interested in engaging with others and can have a negative impact on your community. One way to manage these bombarders is by designating a place, like a Subgroup, for group members to promote their service offerings.
Subgroups are automatically available to all of your group members and are easy to set up. Highlighting this promotional opportunity satisfies those who want to self-promote and keeps your discussion boards open for business. You can also feature members in other ways, such as in your occasional emails to the group membership or in a featured discussion that you update regularly.

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5. Add Some News Feeds

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To keep a steady stream of content available for members to discuss, use the “Manage news feeds” feature to add the RSS feeds for your blog or other blogs to the News section. The posts will then become automatically available to the members of your group for reading and discussion. Of course, you don’t want to flood the boards with self-promotion, so if you aren’t getting enough news inputs from your users, you may want to remove the feed and update the news section with a variety of content manually.

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6. Facilitate Connections Outside of LinkedIn

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It’s natural for members to seek to make non-LinkedIn connections after being active in your group for awhile. You can offer a range of options to help your members engage elsewhere on the Internet or offline.
Women 2.0, an organization for women entrepreneurs in technology, has a LinkedIn group founded by Angie Chang with over 18,000 members. This group provides numerous opportunities for members to connect apart from the group. Members can share their Twitter handles in a featured discussion, or participate in a Women 2.0 Startup Essentials Workshop for face-to-face interaction. Depending on the size of your group, you might consider starting a Meetup group for local interaction, hosting a webinar, or arranging a dinner or meeting at an industry conference or event.

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7. Take a Poll

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Use LinkedIn’s Polls application to get feedback from your members on group features and functionality. Create a free poll and then highlight it in your group, either by linking to it on the discussion boards or by submitting the poll’s URL to your News section. Be careful; if you make the poll available in the general directory, your responses won’t be limited to group members — anyone on LinkedIn can respond.

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8. Promote Your Group

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The sheer size of LinkedIn means that your group is likely to get some members without much effort on your part. But this shouldn’t be an incentive to neglect promotional tools. Some of the strategies you can use to promote your group include low-hanging fruit like inviting others in your network to join, encouraging members to invite their colleagues, and by highlighting your group to other, non-competing groups (LinkedIn members can belong to up to 40 groups simultaneously).
Shah took his group to the next level by promoting it on his standalone OnStartups blog as a static link, as well as in specific articles. He issued this call to action to potential members: “Are you passionate about startups? Then, connect with other like minded people in the LinkedIn OnStartups group”. He even created a custom URL (http://linkedin.onstartups.com) that was co-branded, catchy, easy to remember, and short enough to fit on Twitter.
Do you have any best practices for managing LinkedIn groups? Share your ideas in the comments.