May 30, 2013
With the popularity of LinkedIn Groups growing alongside the other conversation platforms, such as LinkedIn Today and company pages, it has become a considerable challenge to identify the most relevant groups to join.
Let’s say you are an IT professional looking to network with your peers… How do you go about choosing the right group? For the IT industry alone, there are over 5,000 groups to choose from!
There are advanced, systematic ways to identify the optimum LinkedIn Group that suits your aims and content marketing strategy. This requires extensive, in-depth quantitative analysis of content, demographics and activity of the groups within the industry.
That said, if you don’t have the time or resources, it is worth simply having a browse through the most popular discussions as well as familiarising yourself with the basic statistics of the group in question. I’ve had a look and chosen the following 3 groups, and each stands out for their very own reason…
- 524,029 members
- Comments per discussion: 0.16
- Majority function: Marketing (18%)
Reason for attention: Half a million members!
E-Marketing Association, founded in 2007, has acquired over half a million members within the space of 6 years! This is a truly impressive achievement, and the ripple effect of membership growth is worth having a look at…
The graph above shows the number of new members per week – the more members joined the group, the higher the reach and awareness of other potential members to join the group grew in turn. Over the first year there were around 20-100 new members per week, until July 2008, when the ripple effect came into full force, generating over a thousand new members per week! Long-term persistence paid off. Truly impressive.
- 93,013 members
- Comments per discussion: 0.34
- Majority function: Marketing (13%)
Reason for attention: 280 discussions a week!
E-Commerce Network is a similar LinkedIn mega-group… It stands out with an impressive 280 discussions per week. Even though only every third discussion generates a comment, it still indicates that the volume of information being shared on LinkedIn is enormous!
The most popular recent discussion provoked 50 comments. It has a slightly controversial title, thought-provoking content, and a simple yes/no question… All the ingredients necessary for an explosive discussion!
- 25,762 members
- Comments per discussion: 4.1
- Majority function: Finance (15%)
Reason for attention: high quality discussions
It must be really challenging to administer a mega group like the two I looked at above. Spam and irrelevant posts invariably creep in unless a stringent monitoring process is set in place. Microsoft Excel Users group have maintained an impressively high quality of discussions whilst enabling the membership to grow to over 25,000. It is a difficult balance to keep. Either the group is small but of high quality, or vice-versa. However, Microsoft Excel Users have achieved both.
Ultimately, each individual LinkedIn Group has its own mini-world and culture. Choosing the right group to join is a difficult, but not impossible, task. As long as you analyse both quality and quantity of discussions as well as the demographics, your content marketing efforts should soon bear fruit!
You can also learn How to provoke good LinkedIn discussions from us.
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