Tip: 6 Lessons For Building A Highly Engaged LinkedIn Group

Community is a truly under-utilized instrument in the social marketer’s toolkit. Keeping customers and potential customers engaged in conversations that your brand hosts, takes part in, or can learn from is incredibly valuable.

Whenever I see a great example of a brand hosted community, I like to find out why it is working and share those insights.

Rarely is that work done so well for me by the brand itself, but Kapost is the exception to that rule. There is a great Kapost blog post here, from the smart Andrew Coate, that spells out 12 lessons he learned in building out their content marketing focused LinkedIn group.

This group has over 15,000 members (as of Feb. 11 2015) and is the largest of its kind. Andrew and Kapost has done an amazing job of creating this community.

But one of the trends from his 12 lessons that I think is the most important is the investment Kapost has made in this group. They are paying a community manager to keep this group healthy and growing. They are paying for ads to promote the group. Other Kapost team members invest time in growing the group and keeping the content fresh.

Community requires investment of time and money. Just like any marketing that is worth doing.

Here are the top takeaway from the Kapost Content Marketing group on LinkedIn:

1. Conversations: Focus on increasing conversations per group member, not the number of group members
2. Social Ads: Use social ads to promote your community
3. Ban Links: Do not allow links and self promotion in the group (again, focus on conversations)
4. Be Brief: Ask “single, brief, direct questions” – it’s a skimmer’s world
5. Prune and maintain: Clear out and/or engage content on a regular basis
6. Get Personal: Send personalized invites to bring in new members and welcome each new member

Read the full list of lessons and Andrew’s full account here.