LinkedIn Groups: multi-platform internet experience

Thursday, July 15th, 2010 - LinkedIn

LinkedIn Groups: multi-platform internet experience

One of the things that I do as a recruiter on a daily basis is use LinkedIn. It is the most useful business tool and comprehensive virtual Business White pages that exists today. Like most recruiters, it saves me thousands of pounds per year to find great candidates.

It is much easier to find business professional people on LinkedIn than it is in a telephone directory or via Google. Globally, there are 75million people on the platform (around half in North America, over 2million in the UK), all of whom have noted their contact details and what they would like anyone who sees their profile to contact them about: permission marketing 101.

LinkedIn Groups

Beyond connecting and finding people, the most useful part of LinkedIn is LinkedIn Groups. Groups are where you can find people who have similar interests to yours in either your profession, geography, industry or company. LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups at any one time, which is more than enough for most people.

There are two immediate gains to joining groups on LinkedIn:

• You can connect to fellow group members
• You can interact with fellow group members

LinkedIn has been undergoing a revamp recently, which has changed a few things about its operation. In the previous version of LinkedIn Groups:

• To start a discussion you simply needed the ability to write a headline and an question or a comment
• There was a second section called News, which allowed you to insert onto the platform either your own blog or website entry url, or material that you found on the web somewhere. You could then add a comment to start the debate

In the revamp, LinkedIn has removed the News tag, but effectively merged Discussions with News. Now you get three boxes to fill out:

1. A headline
2. A piece of discussion text or comment
3. A website url

LinkedIn Groups multi-media!

The result is that LinkedIn is now positively encouraging the engagement of the multi-media web platform into LinkedIn, something which a few years ago would have been unthinkable. To an extent, the discussions in Groups now look more like those at Digg or Mixx or other social bookmarking websites – a quite para dyne shift.

The upside is that the discussion becomes livelier and easier to engage, more like the rest of the current internet.

However, the downside to this is that if you want to start a discussion, LinkedIn is also by default positively encouraging group members to have an external blog or website to be able to import content and create suitable discussion. Its not compulsory, you can still start a discussion with just a headline and a piece of text – but it’s not exactly encouraged in the resultant black text on white background format.

This change was I have to say was some what of a pain initially for our Professional CV Writing Service. Why? Because one of the key elements in it is use of LinkedIn, with an option to start a blog to create more engagement. Now, it seems the best way to engage and be recruited is to start a blog and link it in.

LinkedIn Groups blog

How hard is it to start a blog? Great, easy to operate and well indexed blog platforms are available at WordPress or Google’s own Blogger. If I was making a single choice, I would start with Blogger, which is both simpler to use, indexes quicker and SEO’s better – wonder why?!

Rather than making the name of your blog complex around some fancy keyword centric phrase, just choose your name, which will mean the format will be: tomsmith.blogspot.com. Then write three blog entries, and link it to your LinkedIn profile.

Now each time you write a new blog entry, or want to start a new discussion at LinkedIn, simply:

• Go to your blog
• Write the new entry
• Note the URL
• Then start a suitable discussion at LinkedIn

LinkedIn groups – the new multi-platform internet experience!

Good Luck!

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7 Responses to “LinkedIn Groups: multi-platform internet experience”

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   July 17th, 2010 at 1:29 pm

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6. Dominic Bercier Says:
   July 26th, 2010 at 9:44 pm

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7. James Lichter Says:
   July 27th, 2010 at 2:51 pm

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