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How to Increase Members in LinkedIn Groups

12 Jul 2010

12 Jul, 2010  LinkedIn, social media

I’m struggling to get more members to join my WebinarListings LinkedIn group.  Every week, I go and look to see how many members I have… each week, it’s 41, 41, 41, ooh, 42!  But that was my new intern joining :-)  LinkedIn can be incredible beneficial at spreading the word about a topic/company, and building relationships, so I’d like to leverage its power more.  Here are all the things I do to try to get interaction and members, and I’d love to hear any other thoughts you have!

LinkedIn

Post the Link Whenever Possible

I post the link to my LinkedIn group wherever I can… for example,

  • my email signature
  • the background of my Twitter page
  • my Facebook Fan page
  • in other related LinkedIn groups
  • as a Facebook/Twitter update to encourage people to join

Add Content to the Group content is king

As they say, “content is king”, and this is no different on LinkedIn.  When you add content to a group, members get notified (if they have their account set up to allow that).  If the content is interesting to them, they may choose to comment.  Then in the weekly emails that go out with LinkedIn updates, their participation will be noted in that newsletter.  That way, then their friends know about the group, making it that much more viral.  The content I add to the group includes:

  • Blog posts on the WebinarListings website
  • Other related articles that group members may enjoy
  • Conversation starters (discussion topics)
  • RSS feed (in our case, any Featured webinars are automatically posted to the group)

Invite People to Join

I have invited my personal contacts from LinkedIn and my email account to the group to try to get more visitors.

Advertise

I am not currently advertising on LinkedIn, but I had in the past, in order to try to get more group members.


I also do a lot of participating in other groups on LinkedIn (I am a member of 50 groups), but that doesn’t promote my group, it just promotes my personal profile/business.

What other ideas do you have to build membership in LinkedIn groups? Anything I’m missing that can help get me out of the flat membership of 42 people?

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  • webinarlistings

    Lots of great comments on this on LinkedIn! Also it was discussed around 5:00 on the MarketingOverCoffee podcast – http://bit.ly/aFelEX

  • http://www.rachel-levy.com Rachel Levy

    Here are a few good ideas I've heard on this topic in LinkedIn groups:

    - be sure you have a clear benefit to joining the group
    - ask key people to join your group — people “troll” others' profiles for good groups to join, so getting some key people will start the ball rolling
    - ask people in email with a link to your group

  • http://DCincome.com/blog GeraldC

    test

  • http://twitter.com/GrowMap Internet Strategist

    I suspect the cause is simply saturation. Many who would otherwise be interested already have too many groups, collaborations, Social Networks and other activities to handle already. Something has to give somewhere.

    Eventually we are going to have to prioritize and prune or simply accept that we are not going to be regular participants. I have ideas for solutions; however, none of them are yet available.