I'm helping a client resurrect their LinkedIn group.
There are over 70,000 members and an average of 40-50 posts per day.
Sounds promising, doesn't it?
Guess how many people Like, Comment, or Share posts?
ZERO.
I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and couldn't find any interactions.
This group is like one of those community bulletin boards where people pin their flyers on top of other flyers.
You see lots of flyers but they all blur together like a collage, so you don't read any of the flyers.
My goal is to turn this group into an active community with real conversations.
The problem with most LinkedIn groups is they do not have active moderators or community managers.
Here's how Hubspot defines a community manager.
A community manager acts as the liaison between an organization and its audience. They act as the voice, tone, and moderator of the brand through community support, content distribution, and digital engagement to build brand presence and trust, both online and in-person.
Most LinkedIn groups were created when there were very few rules.
Aggressive marketers built LinkedIn groups so they could harvest email addresses to build their email lists.
Group moderators could also send LinkedIn messages directly to all group members.
LinkedIn members complained about the aggressive marketing, so LinkedIn changed the rules.
You can no longer message your entire group and you can't export the email addresses of your group members.
This severely limits the ability of the group moderator to communicate with the group.
As you know, marketers jump on board like banshees when they see a tactic working and quickly abandon ship once it stops producing results.
Most of these groups would look like ghost towns if it weren't for automation.
Automation lets people blast an article to numerous groups at once, so it looks like the groups are active but it's a one-way conversation.
Bots are logging into the groups every day, but real people are not.
Who wants to log into a group to read an endless stream of sales pitches?
Well moderated groups do not allow this.
Well moderated groups have real conversations between members (remember the good old days when social media was really "social"?).
What makes a good community manager/group moderator?
Good moderators build relationships with group members.
Good moderators start conversations.
They ask questions.
They are good listeners.
Good moderators love to do research and share industry trends.
Well moderated groups have a team of moderators.
Involve your community members by inviting active members of your group to be moderators.
Share relevant content every day and ask a question at the end of the post to get feedback from members.
When people provide feedback, continue the conversation by thanking them and probing deeper into their response.
If you want to see one of the best LinkedIn groups, join the Harvard Business Review Discussion Group.
If you have a favorite LinkedIn group, leave a comment and let me know.
