How Salespeople Can Make Valuable Contributions to the New LinkedIn Groups Experience

As a sales professional on LinkedIn, you get the value of a shared space where you can keep pace with industry trends, build your personal brand, and strengthen important relationships.

Driven by our commitment to evolve and promote that sense of community, we recently unveiled a new LinkedIn Groups experience. In addition to making Groups available in the main LinkedIn feed and app, we’ve added new features designed to drive more value through the interactions taking place in the 2 million+ groups on LinkedIn.

While these changes offer new ways to engage with your groups, it’s also important to note that the same engagement principles apply for earning coveted buyer trust. Don’t forget to carefully review the group description and rules before requesting to join a group.

Now let’s dive in and explore how you can take advantage of the reimagined LinkedIn Groups experience.

Establish Your Value

One of the best ways to get prospects to actively seek you out is by becoming known in your groups as a trusted resource. You can convey the value you offer through your authentic interactions, along with the comments and content you share with your groups. Before you post your own content, be sure to review the latest conversations to get a sense of the culture and see if there are opportunities to jump in and help others.

Remember, professionals are on LinkedIn to share knowledge, build relationships, and advance their careers. With a selfless focus on being a helpful resource, show your unique perspective on the topics that matter most to prospective buyers. Do this well and prospects will visit your LinkedIn Profile and Company Page to further explore how you might be able to help them achieve their goals.

Elevate the Conversation by Sharing Rich Media

Quality interactions are the result of quality conversations. Now you can spark more vibrant conversations by sharing rich, embedded media, native video, and multiple images in your posts. According to our analysis, posts with an image get 98 percent more comments. Unlike in the past, you can include rich media in your replies to comments and even edit your posts and comments, giving you more control over your side of every conversation.

Here’s a tip to keep in mind: When you post videos from desktop, you can add closed captioning that provides important context. For instance, maybe your caption highlights a key point so the group gets the main message even if they don’t watch the full video. Or perhaps you add colorful commentary to show your unique take on the video content.

Time Your Interactions to Encourage Better Engagement

You’ve always been able to stay up-to-date on what matters to your prospects and customers by participating in LinkedIn Groups. But now you can more easily track all the conversations and activities going on in your groups. How? You’ll be notified when someone comments on one of your group posts, making it that much easier for you to respond to engagement in a timely manner.

Stay Informed and Engage from Anywhere

The better you know your target audience, the better you can prospect and close deals. LinkedIn Groups offers a unique space for finding out firsthand what matters to your prospective buyers and customers. You can now stay engaged and build up that knowledge base from anywhere by accessing your groups using the LinkedIn iOS and Android app.

Develop Your Prospecting List

As you’re engaging with people in a LinkedIn group, you can qualify them as prospects based on their pain points and other relevant details they share. When you spot a promising connection, you can reach out to that person privately. Just keep in mind that you are allowed to send 15 free 1:1 messages to fellow group members each month (that’s combined across all groups you belong to, not 15 per group). Once connected directly with a prospect, you can further develop the relationship by sharing information and ideas in line with their interests and needs.

The Latests LinkedIn Groups Features

We’ve already started rolling out the following features:

• Navigate to your groups more easily. You’ll be able to quickly find and get to your groups right from a navigation panel on the LinkedIn home page.

• Keep the conversation going from your LinkedIn Feed. Soon you’ll be able to start and join conversations in your groups right from your main feed. You’ll be able to reply to comments or share an interesting article without having to navigate to your group.

• Easily discover new groups that match your interests. Looking for new groups you may want to join? You’ll be able to discover recommended groups based on your network and interests from the My Network tab on desktop.

By taking advantage of the latest changes to Groups, you’ll find yourself getting even more value out of this unique professional community. Best of all, you can easily participate in your groups alongside everything you already love to do on LinkedIn. And you can get started without skipping a beat since all Groups are being migrated automatically to the new experience.

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