LinkedIn groups can help you to grow your business. I’ve talked about LinkedIn before but I’d like to provide a bit more depth about groups as they offer a lot of opportunities. Like any social network it requires an investment of time and you need to plan your approach. In this blog post I am going to show you some leads that have recently been posted and provide you with a plan on how to successfully network on LinkedIn groups. At the moment there are just over 1.2 million groups to choose from so there’s a very good chance there will be a few groups of interest.
Before I provide details of the approach here are a couple of leads which I’ve seen over the last few weeks:
As you can see one is from a nationwide company in the US seeking SEO services while the other is from a UK company needing a mobile app. They both appear to be pretty attractive pieces of business.
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If you want to use LinkedIn here is what I suggest you do with regard to groups where your potential customers are:
Research
Find out which groups are relevant by using the search function in LinkedIn. Use speechmarks to narrow down your search e.g. “furniture manufacturers”. For further help in identifying groups, use Google to search for recommendations as some industries have a lot of groups and it can be a job in itself to weed out the best ones. You can also use LinkedIn’s questions & answers facility as there may be some recommendations here too.
Monitor
At this stage you are only gathering intelligence so you need to join some groups so that you start to receive their updates. By updates I mean an email which lists the conversations which are currently taking place in the group. You can actually view the content of some groups without joining (if they are open groups) but I usually like to see the email updates as they tell you how many new discussions and comments there are. This provides an idea of how active the group is.
Understand
Get a feel for the group to see if it is right for you and whether there are any opportunities for your business. Study the conversations to see if you can contribute in any way.
Approach
Think about your approach and the value you can add. You are not in selling mode and if you are, you won’t get very far. If you keep the value approach in mind you can’t go wrong.
Get involved
Start participating in conversations and don’t expect miracles. The more you give, the more likely you will get something in return. You will be remembered if you help someone and especially if you have gone out of your way to provide value.
I hope you found these tips on LinkedIn groups useful and if you have any questions or tips you’d like to add, I’d love to hear from you.
