INBOUND 2015 I&E: Viveka Von Rosen "Effective Use of LinkedIn Groups in Your Marketing"

Thank you so much. This is awesome. This room is bigger than most of the rooms I keynote in. Also, Aziz, I did find smaller glasses. Also, they really want me to do a wet T shirt contest. I don't know if you notice this full of ice, so we'll see. Maybe later. If you're falling asleep, I might do that later. I am wearing white after all, which apparently Mark tells me now I'm going to look like a floating head in all the video. But that's different. I mean, we have to sexy LinkedIn up. All right, so we're here to sexy LinkedIn up, right? Woo. How exciting is LinkedIn? Thank you. I'll pay you later. Yeah, it's not our sexiest social media channel for sure. And one of the things I always say before I even get in my presentation, we have to stop thinking about LinkedIn as a social media site. It has social media aspects for sure, but it's a business site and it's a business tool. Above and beyond that, that's a whole other speech, which I will give it another time, maybe next year. HubSpot. Next year. I'll be back. But we're here to talk about LinkedIn groups, which actually is one of the more social aspects of LinkedIn. I'm not going to go basic, so if you want to know how many groups you can join and what type of groups there are, I will gladly talk to you about that later. We're going to do a slightly more advanced thing on how you can use, not lose. Well, maybe lose depending on how you use groups, how you can use groups for marketing. So a little bit about how you can use other people's groups and then more specifically, how you can use your own groups in marketing. There are, as you can see on this slide. Oh, by the way, please feel free to Tweet me. I'm LinkedIn expert and of course, use Inbound15. There are 3.1 million groups on LinkedIn. There's actually probably more than that. This was a 2014 station, so my guess is there's like 3.5 million groups. So for some of my comrades who say, get a group, leads will pour in. It's crowded real estate. Yeah, get a group most definitely, and then make it kick ass, which we'll talk about today. The other thing is there are 8,000 LinkedIn groups created every week. So just in the past couple minutes, some of you have been creating groups. So there we go. We've just added to that number and 42% of people think that LinkedIn groups are useful. Now that's kind of sad. Only 42% think it's useful and yet most of them are on it. So how many people think LinkedIn groups still rock? We had some hands raised. And how many people haven't used groups in forever because they're spammy? Spammy spam bots. Right, okay. Misconception. And we'll talk about that, too. The average number of group that LinkedIn users use or join is seven. Now, you can join up to 50 groups. Oops, I said I wasn't going to tell you the basics. You can join up to 50 groups, but you're going to want to make sure that you shut down the noise because LinkedIn groups are really, really noisy. We'll talk about that, too. There we go. And wait a second. 42% of LinkedIn users consider groups useful. 60% apparently. I had two different stats. 2013, 2015. Okay, so we see the progression. It's gone downhill. I actually didn't plan that. Note to self read slides at least once more before you present. All right, so what we're going to cover today, the best methods for engaging in other people's groups. Best practices for creating and managing your own group. How to quickly grow and engage your group and then marketing and. Oh, yeah, monetizing your group. How many people can clearly say they're making money on their LinkedIn group in some way, shape or form. That's why your business is growing. All right, awesome. All right, dirty little secret. And then I'll get back to LinkedIn. My G community actually does better than one of my LinkedIn groups. So don't leave the room or anything and go find the G guy. But just saying. All right, when communicating in groups, let's talk first about the 30,000 foot plan. We'll get a little nitty gritty. Things like you need to adjust your settings. Right. It is so fricking noisy on LinkedIn. Stalking is okay, depending on how you do it and who you do it to. Never be afraid to share and always be afraid of Swam. So let's talk about what I mean by that. First of all, this is very basic, but if you haven't done it yet, you know, go, go do it on your iPhones right now or on your iPads or on your tablets. How many people actually have a PC type device in the room? Yeah, put your hands down. Jeez. Just kidding. All right, I'm a Mac girl. Like from the watch to the phone to the. Yeah, no, they made me use a PC here. I don't even know how to turn it on. That's why we started two minutes early. All right, adjust your settings. At the very least, choose if you want to show your logo on your LinkedIn profile or not. There are groups you probably want to join just because they're super big. Like jobs on LinkedIn has 2.1 million people and you're not a job seeker, you're not looking for a job. But there's 2.1 million people in the Jobs group that you're now visible to. So consider joining big groups like that. The social media marketing group is huge, almost a million people. Michael's group, Michelle's group. So there's some huge groups that you're going to want to join just because they're big and it makes you more visible on LinkedIn. But you're going to want to turn the noise off. So just get daily or don't get daily digests. Get like weekly digests. All right, that's the only really nitty gritty thing I'm going to talk about. Stalk the influencers. Whether you're in groups, whether you're just on your LinkedIn profile, whether you're in company pages, it is amazing. I think you've noticed in social media how open and available some people are. Never be afraid to say hi. So if you find someone that you want to create a relationship with and the influencer doesn't have to be Chris Brogan, it can be maybe some gateway person in a company that you want to be working with. But whoever that influencer is to you, once you find them, you can communicate with them through groups. You can check their activity. Are they talking, are they sharing? If they are, start commenting. Right? It's just about creating that top of mind awareness. So this is not your own group, these are other people's groups. Now stalking does not mean hanging out at their house at 11 o' clock at night. I mean more like lurking, check them out, integrate. But Stalk has a more interesting connotation. Don't be afraid to share. A lot of people because of swam site wide auto moderation are like, I'm not touching LinkedIn anymore. But don't be afraid to share now. You just want to make sure it's not sales pitch after sales pitch because yeah, then you're going to get swammed. What's trending in your industry? Right? So how many people wrote an article today about all the changes with Apple and the new iPad? Probably some of you were up early or up late last night working on that because it's trending and people want to know about it. You want to know what's trending? Check out Sue Zimmerman's Instagram post. Sue, go like this. She's periscoping me right now. There we go. Sue knows what's trending. Are you talking about your experiences at Inbound 15? Things like this. You can share what's controversial. Now, when you're going to share something that's controversial, if your entire livelihood depends on being neutral, you know, religiously neutral, politically neutral, then maybe don't be controversial about something else. But controversial posts will obviously get more play. More play means more visibility. More visibility means more business. What can you share that's valuable? Right. What can you get or what can you share that gets people to know like and trust you? Right. Bob Berg, all things being equal, people do business with people they know like and trust. How many people have quoted Bob already today or this year? Yeah, it's kind of the fundamental of inbound people do business with people they know like and trust. Customer service. It depends on what type of group you're in, but customer service. Answer questions. As long as you're not a doctor or a lawyer. Give advice, party someone up, cheer someone up, Say, hey, you know, I absolutely love Mark Ensign. Have you read I'm a Dick? No. Who wants to be? Be a dick, be a dick, be a dick. Have you read Be a Dick yet? See, this is, this is what I'm talking about. Controversial, right? Be a dick, be an ass. No, no, it's something completely different. Be a dick means absolutely the opposite. But the name grabs you. Be controversial, give advice and share events. Just make sure that every event you share isn't your own webinar that's dying slowly out in the atmosphere. Obviously, no. 80, 20 or no, obviously the 8020 rule. Maybe even 90, 10. Right? 90% helpful, useful content, 10% meh. And then no outright sales promotions. But Vivica, you talked about this swam thing. What is swam again? It is site wide auto moderation. It is otherwise known as the throwing the baby out with the bathwater clause. If someone, if enough people in one group tag your post as being spammy, you now have to be moderated or your posts have to be moderated in every group you belong to. So one group, you do something that was a little bit too salesy. 3 to 5 people, they won't give me a number. 3 to 5 people go, this is spam. Now, every group you're in, you're in the moderation queue. And here's the thing. Most managers and LinkedIn moderators are lazy. If they check that moderation queue once a week, you're lucky. And if it's a big group and there's 50 posts in that moderation queue, you're out of here. So, again, if you do this, you're good, but if you're overly spammy or salesy, you're probably going to get swammed. Here's another bad thing. Apparently LinkedIn doesn't know how to fix it, and the moderators aren't allowed to fix it. One of my dear friends is in one of my groups. Like, she's amazing. I think someone. I think there was a mean person because mean people suck. I think there was probably a mean person who flagged her. I have to still moderate her posts and all her posts need to be moderated. Suddenly her voice, which is huge in our industry, has been shut down. So it's just something to be aware of because, yeah, mean people suck. All right, let's talk about your own group. So that's probably most of the reason why you're here today. Now, I'm not saying that you have to tattoo the name of your group on your back, although my friend Sean has social media camp right tattooed on his arm. That's insanity. But he for real does. His wife killed him. But you have to commit to a group. You all know by now, right, you're not going to create a Twitter account or a Facebook account and have it go viral without doing anything in it. Well, it's the same thing with groups. Yeah, build a group, the people will come. No, they won't. But we'll talk about how to make them come, hopefully to your group, is what I'm saying. I'm not a cease. Should you even create a group? That's going to be the first question. You know, maybe you came to my course to find out. You actually don't have to create a group. If you create a group, you got to know your audience. Oh, I can help anyone with a face. I can serve anyone with a computer. I can serve anyone who breathes. It sounds like. What's the name of that band? My Type. You know the song My Type? No, you don't want me to do that. You do not want me to sing it. Anyway, basically what he says is, yeah, you're just my type. You have a pulse and you are breathing. You want to be the opposite of that. You really want to know who your audience is. You want to focus your copy and communications on your audience. Obviously, you want to create group rules. This is key because that's how you can easily kick people out and then you want to commit to moderating. So first of all, should you even have a group? It is a time commitment. It is another product you're going to have to market. Do you have the time? Does your company have the time and energy for another product? Because you know, don't get this is something you are going to have to market, just like you'd have to market your last or your latest book. But if you do think that a group is for you or you already have a group, so you might as well keep one. How are you using it? Customer service communication within the company? Are you using it to establish thought leadership? A lot of people in this room, that's a great way to use groups. Most people are probably here wanting to know how you use groups for lead generation. We will cover that. And then are there other reasons? What are some other reasons that someone in the room might have a group? Does anyone else have a group in the room for some other reason? Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah, Great. So, yeah, so if you've got a group, you can send announcements. You're jumping ahead. I'm about to cover that. Yeah, but. So there are many, many different reasons to have a group. Just be clear on what yours is and make sure that all the content you share and when you moderate, try to keep all that content aligned with your purpose for your group. You might even in your description section, tell people why you have the group. Now, here's a cool idea from my friend Miles Austin. He told me, how about adopting a group, which is in fact what I ended up doing with one of my bigger groups. You can create your own group. Of course, that gives you ultimate control of the group. You are the owner. You can shut it down, turn it on, choose your managers, choose your moderators. But you start at zero. You got no one in that group. And you've got to attract people to your group. And now you've got at least 3.1 million competitors. So how about adopting a group if you're in a group that used to be good and now it sucks, or if you're in a group that has a lot of followers but no action, no activity going on, Reach out to the moderator and see if you can adopt it. Ask them if you can become the moderator of that group. That will give you all most of the functions of the owner. And now you don't have to build your own following because you already have one. And you can change the picture. You can even change the Group name, I would ask their permission first. You can change the logo, you can change the description, but if there's a group that is built out to a pretty decent level, why not adopt it? So it might be worth looking at your groups and seeing if there's anything out there that's enough in alignment with your business that you can just take it over and use the following steps. As I mentioned, you've got to know your audience. There's a really good ebook that LinkedIn just put out about group moderation. There's a link in here somewhere, will find it. But it does talk about all the things that you should do in a group. So I just kind of condensed some of it down. As I said, don't be all things to all people. The more niche, or niche if you're a French Canadian, the more relevant and engaged the group is, the more successful it's going to be. Obviously, location based groups are awesome and they support face to face interactions. So things like the HubSpot inbound group. Right. Supporting the activity that's going on here. Consider user groups. Using groups for user groups and focus groups and membership groups. Yeah, LinkedIn. Is there anyone from LinkedIn here? Yeah, of course. Consider user groups. LinkedIn. They've shut down almost every user group they have. I don't understand it. Right. Isn't that number one? What does your audience want? Let them tell you. Ask them. So even though LinkedIn doesn't really have that many anymore, you should consider using groups as a user group. Focus your copy and communications. You want to make sure you're speaking to your audience. If they're that guy from aseez, the software guy. I love software engineering. You want to speak in that voice to them? Not necessarily what I just did right now, but you want to speak in that voice to them. You want to focus. It's wifd. It used to be wifm, but that's all centered. So it's wft. What's in it for them? Not to be mistaken with ifttt, which is if this, then that. The wift. Isn't that a great, great app? Ifttt. You guys love ifttt. Yeah, that's awesome. Focus on wift. What's in it for them? Why the hell should they be listening? My mom's not in the room, I can say that. Why the hell should they be? List to you. Why the heck should they be a member of your group? Make it interesting. Obviously, duh. Use calls to action. Click here. Watch this. Do this. Follow me. Ask this. Answer this. If you write a post or share a post, whether you're the manager or just someone in another group, always end the post with, what do you think? You know, here's an article I just wrote in response to questions I had been asked about. What do you think? Let me know what you think in comments below. Ooh, here's another ninja trick. This one's actually really good. Are most of you content creators in the room? Raise your hand if you're a content creator. Yeah. Okay, so sometimes it's hard to find content and sometimes it's hard to get that content shared. But we love the idea of amplification. Use your group to ask people questions, use their answers in a post that you then put both into the original post and into a new post. And then you mention or tag those individuals who answered the question so that they see the post, so that they go, oh, I'm famous. And they share it with their audience. Right. You get two pieces of content and a bunch of new friends. They're not influencers, you know, they might not be Brian Kramer or they might be, but who cares? You made them feel good. They gave you hopefully some decent information. You've created content together and now you're all sharing it. And now again, you've increased your visibility, you've increased the momentum of your group. They might get, you know, you can promote the post so that it sticks to the top, like pinning it on Pinterest. Woo. I know nothing about Pinterest. So, you know, it's such a great way to use your group and use the people in your group. And I mean use in the most wonderful and loving way. And by the way, keywords. Keywords are so freaking important on LinkedIn. They just are. Now we're not talking SEO, Google Meta, Taggy, type keywords. We're just talking about what would people type into Google to find someone like you. And you want to have a list of those keywords that are focused on your audience, that are focused on your content, that you can plop in where it's relevant and when it's relevant, but it will help your posts get found. There is not that anyone even knows or uses post search on LinkedIn groups, but there is one. If you own a group, please create your group rules. HubSpot has done a really, really good job with this. Your rules tell people what the group is about, what you will and will not accept. You know, who's part of the group, why they might want to join the group. There's a lot of stuff you can put in there. There's not really a limit to the size of group rules, but I keep it to, you know, three, 400 words tops. You can use this both in the rules field. So as a manager under Settings, there's actually a rules feature. So you want to create it first there, but then don't create it and forget about it because everyone else will have two. So again, repost. It is an update. So that's what Chelsea, Chelsea Henderson did. Yeah. This is the HubSpot group. That's what Chelsea did. She reposted it as an update and then she asked for feedback. Hey, do you all agree with these rules? What do you think we should do with these rules? What should we include with these rules? What more do you want from the group? It's all about creating that engagement because that increases visibility, which means more money. And I mentioned the commitment part. How many people are afraid to commit sees like how many people are single in the audience. Woo. Right. And. And I was one of them. I'm so happy in my committed relationship. Right. They are absolutely a commitment. If you cannot do it yourself, if you are not committed to monitoring your group yourself, get someone, an intern and assistant, but get someone who's actually going to do it. So get help. The moderator's field guide. That's what it's like. So if you want to Google LinkedIn's moderator's field guide, that will get you the URL and then actually join the LinkedIn group moderator community. Okay. But this, you probably can't see it. It's really small. This guy, Steven Bonaconi. Bonacoursi. Stephen Bonacoursi. He's got the Lean Six Sigma group. He spends eight plus hours a day moderating his group. Eight hours a day. Guessing he doesn't work. Hopefully enough he's generating and monetizing his LinkedIn group enough. Or hopefully someone is paying him eight plus hours a day. Realistically for most people, you're looking at about one hour a day. The bigger your group, the more time you're gonna spend. My assistant on my LinkedIn? No, not LinkedIn. What is it called? It's called the social media marketing managers group that gets. She spends probably half hour a day, half hour to an hour a day on that one. And we've got 24,000 members. So you know, that's just kind of be aware. The bigger your group, the more time you're going to have to spend moderating it. But if you've got a giant group like that, hopefully it's generating money. For you, it's generating leads. It's feeding people into your funnel. All right. But my group only has eight people, Vivica. All right, let's talk about how to grow your group membership and how to increase engagement. There we are. You need to put a marketing machine into place. I just had to do some slides that weren't, like, gray and red. All right. Automate with templates. Did you know that LinkedIn has templates that go out automatically? You don't even have to create some crazy funnel. Just in the management section again. So you can create messages that go out when someone asks to join the group. When you've accepted them into the group, you can do that automatically or moderate it. People you don't want in the group, you can create different messages that go out automatically. Why wouldn't you? You can send weekly announcements. Oh, where'd he go? Over there. You can send weekly announcements. Not enough people are doing this. This is kind of the whole purpose of having a big group, other than being a nice, generous, helpful and useful person. Part of it is just to get your name and your brand and your business out there. Entice with influencers, which we talked about a little bit, and then serial content. I love this idea. This is one of my business partners, Roger Parker. He's written pretty much every four Dummies book ever written. He's the one who kind of like emphasized this to me, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Build your templates. Number one, automate that engagement. Right? CTA's calls to action. Follow us for this reason. Join us for this reason. Guide them to another platform if they don't qualify for your group. Maybe your group is a private group. It's an employees only group. Someone asked to join. Okay, you. You're welcome to join our group or you're not welcome to join our group. But hey, we've got a public group over here. Why don't you try this group? Or hey, I've got this G community. Why don't you go over there instead? What can you share that's of value in the thank you letter? Thank you for joining our group. I really appreciate you. Here's a coupon, too. Here's a free promo code for. Here's a download of my latest ebook. Give them something that's of value. And again, reiterate the rules of engagement at least a little bit in a paragraph or so. Or point them to the link that has your rules of engagement on there, but let them know what's Expected of them. Not enough people use these templates. They're amazing little machines. It'll probably take you a total of 15 minutes to create. And if you've got a group and your group is growing or it's not, why not use these different templates? So again, they're all just in the Manage, under the Manage tab. Use your weekly announcements and focus on the wift. Right. What's in it for them? This is how many people are a member of and women a member of Citibank's Connect professional women's network. Good. Yeah. It is like one of the best groups if you want to see how to do a good group. Now, it is a sponsored group, which I'll talk about in a bit, but they've got it down. You know why they've got it down? Because they've got four paid moderators that manage it. But here's a typical announcement. So like one announcement, one weekly announcement. And it had everything I was going to talk about in it. So I copied and pasted it into a. A really, really small screen. She recapped the week she went through and said these were some of the best posts of the week. This is what we talked about this week. And that makes people go, oh, man, I missed that post. I'm going to go back and look at it. Wow, how did I miss that? I didn't even know that Apple released an iPad this week. Oh, my God. I got to go back and read it. Recap the week again. Focus on what's in it for them. This is for you. This is why we have this group. This is what you're going to get out of it. CTAs to coming events. It is Citibank. They make money. They're here to make money. They pay LinkedIn a ton of money for their sponsored group to make more money. So they're gonna share upcoming events that they've got. They run contests, by the way, with the sponsored group, you get a bunch of free memberships that you can or premium memberships that you can give away for free to your group members. So maybe create a contest with that. If you don't have a sponsored group, what kind of contest can you create? Interestingly enough, because I have nothing better to do, I've gone through LinkedIn's end user agreement and I haven't found anything anywhere that says you can't run contests like Facebook. Forget about it. You gotta buy all kinds of special software and pay people and maybe a little bribe here or there. But LinkedIn contests are fine. People love free stuff if it's good free stuff. 3D printer, everyone. 3D printer. And then, of course, you announce the winners, the contest winners drive traffic back to the group and give easy links, either bit ly or just embedded links that they can share. You know, hey, if you know anyone else who would love, you know this professional women's network. If you know anyone else who would get the value out of this group, here's an easy link they can join up right away. All of those things make it easier to grow your group again. Maybe an hour's worth of work to create something as professional as this. Why not use it in your weekly announcements? Influencer marketing. It makes me gag and throw up a little bit in my mouth, but nonetheless, it is true, right? And an influencer is whoever you want an influencer to be. But if someone's got a lot of followers and gets a lot of visibility, why wouldn't you utilize that? And if that person happens to be your friend who kidnaps you last year when you flew in. So, Sue, I fly in. She's texting me like, where are you? I just landed. I'd already ordered my Uber. I'm picking you up. Okay. Where's your hotel? I'm staying at Airbn. No, you're not. You're staying with me. I went off on a tangent. Never mind. Anyway, the point is, sue is visible, right? Sue Zimmerman, Instagram expert, is very visible. If I want my stuff seen, I have her share it. We interview each other, right? Because we're both very visible. But again, an influencer might just be someone who's visible in your company or visible in a company that you want to be in. But you definitely want to build relationships with influencers, not only for the visibility, but it kind of gives you credibility, too. Isn't that why we take selfies with people? And by the way, I'm happy to stay here and take selfies with you. Isn't that why we take selfies of ourselves with influential, famous people at conferences, like, you know, Sir Richard Branson and me. Hi, we're besties. I've never actually met him that was Photoshopped entirely. You can get great content. You know, influencers are usually influential because they're smart and they know stuff and they write about stuff all the time. Get some of that stuff. Repurpose. Don't make them write something new. Repurpose. Like, what's your best tip on whatever? But you share it. You get that visibility and expands the reach. Because, of course, if you've Got an open group. So there's closed groups. All that means is your content is closed and no one can see it. And open groups, your content is visible to everyone on LinkedIn. With an open group, if you have an influencer sharing it becomes visible to their audience as well. And. And you might attract more followers to your group. Create serial content. Love this idea, right? 10 tips. 2. Tip one goes on Monday. Tip two goes on Tuesday. Tip three goes on Wednesday. The five best ways too, right? So you can create these series and send them out one time once a day. You can then package them up as existing updates and create a published post. Why not? And then you share that post. And you can also, of course, as I mentioned earlier, you can promote pertinent updates to the top of your profile. But creating these best of series gets people coming back because they read this great tip and they go, oh, wow, I wonder what else he has to say. And then they go back to your group and then they read all the other updates and then they share it with their friends because there's a share button. And then that gets amplified and then other people go, ooh, that's really cool. What's that group? I'm going to join that group. Simple things. These are really simple. It's just right, get into the habit of doing it, marketing and monetizing your group. How many minutes do I have left? Where is he? He's gone. All right, I'm here forever. I have like 10 minutes. Okay, I made you wait to the end. I just did this picture because, like, right, like, who's that flexible? And what is she doing? I don't know, but she's very integrated. You could tell. She's like, oh, she's very integrated in who she is. All right, so let's talk about some ninja tricks. Marketing your groups and monetizing your groups. I mentioned at the very beginning, your group is a product and you gots to market it. This is my friend, Jill. Well, no, this will be my friend. That is my friend Jill Konrath's group. Fresh Sales Strategies rocks. How many people are a member of Fresh Sales Strategies? No, seriously, you guys, if you only choose one group on LinkedIn, this should be the group that you follow. Other than the HubSpot's groups, of course. Love, love, love this group. It is full. It is an example of everything I've talked about. Just such fabulous, great, share worthy content. Now what Jill does, because she has a ginormous mailing list is she also sends an email out to her mailing list, letting them know she's got a group on LinkedIn. Because maybe she grew her mailing list from a Facebook ad, or maybe she grew her mailing list from an ebook funnel. You know how? I don't know where'd you find them? But she wants her mailing list to know that she's got this great group where she and other experts in the sale industry share helpful, useful, valuable, pertinent information. So she sends out this email, literally this email. I copied and pasted this one. I got it. Some great things. You can brand it when you send it from your own email server, right? Send it from LinkedIn. There ain't no branding unless you pay a lot of money for it. So mostly there ain't no branding. So. So you get to put your logo, you get to use your website colors. There are clear CTAs join here and click to join buttons. She leads with the what's in it for them? You're going to hear that over and over. You already have. And then she creates a nice customized group URL. Join the group. She got that one. You can't get it. She already got it. But that other people can easily share. And she sends it out to her list. How many people have a list of more than 5,000 people in the room? Oh, come on, be proud. So why wouldn't you let that list know that you've got a group all of a sudden? You will at least get probably 50 to 100 more people. And if they love you, maybe 1,000 to 2,000 more people in your group. But Vivica, I already send information to them in an email, in a newsletter. You know, I've got a drip campaign going. Why would I send them to my group where I'm going to share maybe the same information? Because they ain't reading at all. The more places you can be, the more spaghetti you can be on the wall, the better, right? So the more places you can be without being overly obnoxious, the more likely you are to become more visible, make more money. LinkedIn ads. Now, LinkedIn has ads that you can use to drive people to your company page, but just grab the URL. You can use either the text ads, which don't work at all, so don't bother, or the sponsored update ads where you share maybe a cool update that was shared in your group. Put the link to your group with a CTA. Click here to join our group. LinkedIn ads, which is another whole course which you can get on lynda.com, l, y n d a d o c LinkedIn ads actually have pretty decent ROI if you play them right again, but it's another conversation. But it's something to consider. If you need to grow your group, or more importantly you need to grow a client's group quickly, you might invest in some ads Sponsored Groups now sponsored groups are part of the 25k club, meaning you have to have $25,000 a quarter to invest. It's not that you need to spend $25,000 a quarter, but LinkedIn wants a big budgeting budget before they'll kind of engage with you about ads. But sponsored groups are amazing if you can afford them or if your clients can afford them. So this is enterprise size for sure, but the whole group is company affiliation and branding like no one else's. Ads are going to show up on your sponsored group. There's some advanced community management and analytics that you can use to continue to grow and engage your groups. You get some join group ads so I just told you how to do it for kind of free. Or you can pay $25,000 and sponsored inmail hate sponsored inmail so much, but you can get some sponsored inmails if you are going to send inmails and or sponsored inmails the difference is the price tag and branding. Make sure that it's not hey I'm awesome by my stuff because 99% of the sponsored inmails I see are hey I'm awesome by my stuff. So make sure that if you use inmails it's again the wift. What's in it for them? What value did they bring? Why should they listen to you? You can exclusively promote your content and messages on the right rail and you get event as I said, you got advanced metrics and analytics. Again, probably not for 90% of the room, but if you're enterprise or you work with enterprise clients, it's absolutely worth looking into. And you'll get your own marketing account rep so he or she will walk you through it. All right, I feel really bad because I should have Octopost up here, but I mean I should have HubSpot up there but use some sort of sharing tool, right? So again, your posts are just like any update that you want to make sure you schedule and you share on a regular basis and you can reshare as well. So I use octopost because I like the I think the UI is easy to manage the user interface but you know, use some kind of sharing tool and HubSpot shares to company to groups and Octopost does and I think hootsuite does. I'm not 100%. So a lot of the sharing tools will share to that tool and monetize your group. How many people are blabbing? Yeah, love, okay, you all have to get on blab im. You will become addicted and you know, lose your family. But it'll be worth it. So I just had hangouts before and then like a week ago I added blabs to this screen. But you can monetize your group and make it more interactive. The reason blabs are so free freaking amazing is because you finally get to see and talk to and engage with the people that you've only seen on paper. So if you create a weekly blab, again, time commitment. But if you create a weekly blab or a weekly hangout or a weekly Skype or whatever where you can take questions from your group, where you can interview your group, where you can have activity with your group, it is only going to build the power of your group. And then of course you can always use groups. That's kind of why most of us use them to port people into your sales funnels. And then I mentioned already the weekly announcements. Now as I talk about monetizing your group because I'm a geek and I have gone through the terms of use, LinkedIn's terms of services says this. Don't sell, sponsor or Otherwise monetize a LinkedIn group or any other service or functionality of LinkedIn without the express written permission of LinkedIn. Okay? So it is just an amazing thing that you can do. I think blabs. I think LinkedIn group blabs is like the future of LinkedIn because let's face it, if you really want to engage, you have to leave LinkedIn and go do a tweet, chat or a blab or a Skype interaction. Right? Use it to cross promote your content. Give people a sense of who you really are. Increases engagement. The enrollment is huge because you will get people on your blab who aren't a member of your group. They hear about this awesome group, they join your group and maybe consider t community. So as I conclude, a group is like any other marketing asset. You have to work it to get it to work like anything else in life, right? As we conclude. Are you clear on the purpose of your group? What elements of your group do you need to improve? What strategies will you adopt to increase engagement? What kind of content will you create and share through your group discussions? How can you promote your group and what platforms can you link to your group. And here's my contact information. That's all. Thank you very much. You may now leave in mass exodus. Thank you.