Online Marketing Strategy: Growing a LinkedIn Group

For B2B businesses, LinkedIn has quickly become one of the predominant social networks of interest, providing benefits that range from recruiting top talent to lead generation and reputation management.

Those benefits are key, especially because social media can be a trickier medium to tackle for B2B marketers that aren’t necessarily interested in the mass audience some social platforms boast.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, provides a very targeted mass audience (its user base of business professionals grew from 55 million to 90 million from 2009 to 2010) and, according to the company, its membership includes executives from every company on the Fortune 500 list.

But having a LinkedIn profile and actually using the platform as a way to interact with potential B2B customers are two entirely different beasts. If you’re going to make LinkedIn a part of your social media strategy, I suggest you consider starting and growing a LinkedIn Group.

If you don’t know what a Group page is, think about it like a B2C company’s Facebook page. On LinkedIn, Groups allow businesses to interact with their network, creating private environments that encourage discussion and promote engagement. If you need a step-by-step guide to creating a Group, GigaOm’s Meryl K. Evans wrote a great tutorial last year.

At OpenView, we created our LinkedIn Group because it’s one of the most valuable channels for reaching our audience: Senior Managers of expansion stage technology companies. One of my goals for Q4 was to grow the firm’s LinkedIn Group by 150 percent. To start, I was nervous. It would involve adding 150 new members in three months. But, at the end of 2010, we were able to add 210 new members. Here are a few of the methodologies we used to do it.

Get the word out

We have a growing number of followers on Twitter and a small Facebook fanbase, so my first step was to broadcast the message on those channels. I used bit.ly links to track the success of my messaging and found that the more specific you are concerning the benefit of joining the group, the more clicks/members you will receive.

If I sent a “Join the OpenView LinkedIn Group” tweet, I would be lucky to get one click. But more specific messaging like “Join the OpenView LinkedIn group and participate in conversations with the Partners” had a much higher response. Be sure to think of your audience and the value they will receive from joining the group. Each network offers a different benefit and you should clearly express it to potential followers or members. Then, make sure to actually follow through on it.

Tap into your connections

The low hanging fruit in this scenario represents the members of the firm’s connections on LinkedIn. We reached out to appropriate connections with an invitation to join the group. Notice that I said appropriate connections. Sending a mass invitation to your entire connections list will appear “spammy” and overly “salesy.”

Instead, send targeted messages to your appropriate connections describing the value and benefits of the group. Before you send the invite, make sure you answered this question: What’s in it for them?

If you are sending the message to several people at once, be sure to unclick the option at the bottom of the message that allows recipients to see the other names and addresses in the invitation. You don’t want them to think you just spammed your whole contact list.

Maintain the value

Ultimately, the value of the group lies in the content you are sharing. Even if you can garner clicks to the page, it’s the content that users see when they arrive that will get them to click “Join Group.” We found that posting daily discussion threads, blog posts, or articles from different accounts (to show that several of the firm’s members are contributing) has been extremely effective.

Make it a habit to post at least one piece of content a day. And when you do, try your best to make it conversational. Post links to your blog posts, articles, news, and job postings. LinkedIn Groups are a great place for conversations and debates.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to not only attract members to your group, but to engage them in a way that will keep them coming back for more.

After all, the more users that participate in discussions, the more valuable the group. That feature is a distinguishing quality from Twitter or Facebook. By starting conversations and providing discussion fodder, it allows members to actively converse with numerous people from your company in a public space.

LinkedIn has proven to be a great resource for driving website traffic to our three sites, along with developing relationships with our members. The professional social network is likely to continue its incredible growth and it will continue to open up more doors for B2B businesses in the future. So, create and begin to grow your LinkedIn Group now. You might be able to ride that wave, too.