Tips on monitoring LinkedIn groups

I like helping people on LinkedIn. Some of discussions are really interesting, and sometimes there are questions you can answer and help someone in need. All this—caring about people and helping them without any intentions of selling stuff or getting traffic to your site—is great for starting new relationships and earning trust, which is awesome.

Joining Groups

So, you should start by going on LinkedIn and finding as many groups about your topic as possible and join every single one of them. I use these settings for every group I join:

  • Group Logos. I don’t want many of those on my profile page, so I turn this setting off. 
  • Posts. The only way not to miss anything interesting is to follow all discussions. But you should be ready for enormous amounts of spam (300 emails overnight), which I will teach you how to filter. 
  • Digest Emails. There is no need for digests, because you are already following all discussion.
  • Announcements. Why not? 
  • Messages. You want to let people contact you, so leave in on.

Spam Filtering

The next thing you have to do is spam filtering. This is a huge issue on LinkedIn. People will post links to different articles all the time and sometimes to many groups simultaneously. Notifications about all of these will be coming to your inbox, so let’s stop this now!

I use Gmail, but if you use some other service, it should have the same features. Go to Settings —> Filters and set up 2 filters for your account. In this way, both spam articles and new jobs (which are 99% irrelevant) go to trash never to be seen again.

As a result you’ll get an almost clean inbox and notifications about threads like: “Automated welcome messages on Twitter? What do you think about it. Is it ok or not? and why?” And you know what to do with them ;-).

Bonus tip

Don’t write your website, blog or twitter address in every comment you make. This hurts you credibility, because people will think that you are only promoting yourself and your message doesn’t have any value. Better add your links to your profile and play with SEO, so that people can find your website by googling your name.

Anything you have to share?