Top 4 Reasons to Start Your Own LinkedIn Group
If you don’t already own a LinkedIn Group, you should. It will improve your personal branding, your company’s positioning, and how you interact with partners and customers. LinkedIn allows you to manage ten groups and join fifty, including yours. Ensure you also join fifty groups to be seen by more people more often.
I manage ten groups myself on several diverse subjects, including:
· Mexico Business
· Book Writers
· Beverage Business
· Venture Capital
These few groups have more than 200,000 members, with the Book Writers group passing the 108,000 member mark in 2023—a very active group with thousands of weekly posts and comments.
Why open your group? Here are four things your LinkedIn group will do for you:
1. Become an Expert
When you manage a LinkedIn group, you sign every post as the Administrator. That alone gets you some authority on the subject of the group. If you’re looking to position yourself as an expert, open a group about the industry, not about you or your business. I created groups about Venture Capital, Beverages, Writing, and Doing Business in Mexico. I don’t have groups called Jorge Olson or with the name of my business.
The next step is to open industry-relevant conversations in your posts. Don’t make business announcements. News about your business will not create discussions, but information about the industry will create plenty. I have some posts with more than one thousand comments.
2. Access More People
With your own LinkedIn group, you can contact everyone in your group directly, sending them private messages without penalties from LinkedIn. This feature alone is an incredible perk LinkedIn gives you for your efforts in managing groups. Imagine if you have thousands of people in your industry, you can contact them and introduce yourself as the Group Manager.
That’s not all. LinkedIn Groups allow you to send one email to all the members once per week. Wow! Imagine a database of one thousand, ten thousand, or, like me, more than one hundred thousand members. You have access to all these people with one email. Again, don’t send company news; share value. Send articles, information on the industry, jobs, and things your subscribers will want to open and read.
3. Get More Business
If you provide value and position yourself as an industry expert, you’ll get more business even if you don’t want it. It’s the Karma of business. I call it Unselfish Self Promotion. Your phone will ring, people will contact you through email or LinkedIn, and they will subscribe to your profile and finally offer you jobs, contracts, or partnerships. This is a textbook direct marketing strategy; build your list, increase credibility, form a relationship, and organically get the business. In the last week, I was contacted by two of the largest beverage businesses in the world to sell their beverages in Mexico, all through my LinkedIn Beverage Group.
4. Customer Relationship Management
If you don’t need so many new customers (yea, right!), you can still use LinkedIn Groups to interact with existing customers and manage relationships and expectations. It’s a way to interact with your customers their way, on their turf, the way they want it. You can have several contributors or editors to your group. If you’re a large company, these can be your customer service managers. One thing I like very much is you can follow customers in every job. If they leave their employment to a new and better one, you are still connected to them, and your business can follow them to their next job.
LinkedIn Groups provide an excellent platform to build relationships with like-minded professionals. By creating and managing a group, you can engage with potential customers, partners, and employees who share your interests. With the right strategy, you can use LinkedIn Groups to promote your business, establish yourself as an industry expert, and grow your network.
Opening a LinkedIn Group is an effective way to connect with people who are interested in the same topics as you and leverage the power of social media to reach more people.
Having a coach in your corner is always a good idea when starting your journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Contact me if you need help.
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