Creating your own LinkedIn Group increases your profile and gives you control over the group’s content and reach. The goal with a group is to engage your audience and leverage your company’s thought leadership.

From our experience, it’s best to have a more wide-ranging group for sharing ideas and making connections with people from a variety of backgrounds. If needed, you can create a subgroup later on that is more specific to your company or niche.

Consider taking advantage of LinkedIn’s new Open Groups. With Open Groups, all discussions can be viewed by anyone on the web and be found in search engines. They can also be shared on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. All of these features increase the potential reach of your group.

1. Choosing a Group Name
When choosing a name for your group, you want to make sure not to limit your audience. Again, you want your group to appeal to a wide variety of people, so use a title that reflects that. Think of keywords people searching for similar groups would use.

2. Inviting Members to Your Group
Start by inviting people who are your contacts already and would be interested in the group. Next, search LinkedIn for prospects who have similar interests and would find your group helpful.

When you send invitations try to make a connection rather than just pitching your group. Have you noticed anything interesting this person’s been doing on LinkedIn? Do you have any commonalities? State clearly why the group will be of benefit to them.

3. Welcome Message
We recommend creating a custom Welcome Message template and setting it to automatically send to new members. The message should include what the group hopes to achieve, some guidelines, and should link to something of benefit to your new members – like a whitepaper or interesting post online.

4. Content
You want to have control over the types of content and quality of discussions within your group. Set the tone by posting content related to significant news in your industry. Be a resource to members of your group by providing quality content and information that is helpful to them.

If you are a resource, it doesn’t matter that you are also a sales person. Research shows that people choose to buy from companies and sales people that have not only been a resource but who have also developed an ongoing relationship with them.

The objective is to ensure a level of trust and credibility that will set the standard and tone for your company overall.

5. Engagement

Tips for Increasing Group Engagement in your LinkedIn Group:

• Find relevant blogs and add their RSS feeds to the group’s news feed. This will ensure that fresh content is being posted to your group and it will also send an email to group members (depending on how members have set their notifications) which will encourage them to visit the group page.
• Post some of your blog articles as news articles.
• Post a message encouraging group members to post their own articles.
• LinkedIn users tend to self-promote. To prevent self-promotion from overwhelming your group conversations, consider setting up a subgroup where people can promote themselves, what they do, and their blog URL, or just invite members to share their blogs and Twitter handles.
• Ask for feedback on the group. You can do this using the Poll app.