Jean L. Serio

Jean Serio is the Founder of Get Your Buzz On. She is a recognized LinkedIn, social content & branding strategist. She’s also a speaker & author of the book “Market Like a Pro – 50 Tips to Start Maximizing the Power of LinkedIn to Engage, Connect & Build Your Business Today”.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Jean’s success

Mining groups on LinkedIn for targeted leads

Result if you follow the steps in Jean’s session

Membership in LinkedIn groups that will help establish rapport and trust with potential partners and clients within your niche

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

There are 1 million groups on LinkedIn and according to some recent stats 100 plus new groups are started daily. Those groups include everything from financial and to social media and content marketing groups, travel lawyers, teachers and color consultants, for example. So there is, I am certain, a group for everyone or several groups, for that matter for everyone.

And in these groups, these are all professionals with decades of skills and expertise, they are eagerly waiting to share it all with you. And very importantly, groups are filled with potential clients.

And for job hunters, there are tons of human resource pros and recruiters who would hire you. I mean, why would you not want to be on groups if you could get hired or find clients, client and such clients find you? It’s a lot easier with groups.

You’re right, I can you know, groups there because people are wanting to network there. They’re putting themselves out there. They’ve joined LinkedIn for no reason to see what other opportunities are out there. Whether it’s job opportunity or clients or partners.

You know, the list goes on in terms of you know, your business, and LinkedIn is your online business identity, your professional identity. So we need to make sure that you use it in that way, for sure.

And joining groups is about the right ones for you and your business. It’s not just randomly joining popular groups with millions of members. In fact, it’s best not to join groups with millions of members because it is very difficult even for someone on my level, to raise your visibility, your best to join groups with 20,000 plus members, unless it’s necessary to join a local group with far less, but those are maybe people in your immediate target market.

The groups that will likely be most valuable to most people are those related to your industry, your job function, and your current or desired location that can be very important. If you can find a group which includes both the location and the industry that you’re involved in, for example, accountants in Seattle, those are groups from which you know, you are going to receive the most valuable, or value, excuse me from your membership.

And you should also join alumni groups. I’ll cover that in a moment. So do you agree with me about joining a specific groups land? What’s your thought on that?

Yeah. I mean, there’s no point in, you know, joining groups that you don’t have your potential customers yet. I mean, you’ve got to have a goal. I think when you’re starting out on LinkedIn, you don’t want to have a purpose of you know, what do you want to eventually reach? What’s your, what’s your ultimate outcome?

And if it’s to generate new business and your target customers are accountants in Seattle, join, you know, those types of groups like you know, specific to accountants in Seattle. Don’t go and join, you know, other types of groups, you’re a tech kind of company offering technology to accountants, then, you know, don’t go and join all these tech groups.

You want to go where your target customers are. So absolutely the more nation, more target you go, the more benefit you’re going to get out of interacting in those groups.

And that’s absolutely true. However, I would make one suggestion, you shouldn’t join some groups, which include people who you do not believe are your target audience, but I’ll talk about more on that later on. Because that’s very important. You need to communicate, to participate with people who aren’t usually on your wavelength who may turn out to be clients.

Yeah, I think it’s important to get out there and network and, you know, groups can be a really valuable thing and as you said you know there’s a couple of million groups out there and hundreds joining every day. So you really you know, you’ve really got an opportunity that niche down and be really specific so your know your outcome and go there, go with their, with a purpose.

I did want to cover because it’s very important, how to do some evaluating of which groups you should join. We really need to think when we join a group, or anyone joins a group, what is the potential value, you are, just including that in your last comment, what is the potential value you want to receive from each group?

For example, it’s an opportunity to share knowledge. It might this might sound counterintuitive, I know. But hear me out. The more knowledge you can share freely with others, the more benefits you’ll receive and joining somebody groups who are not your target audience allows you to present yourself to thousands who didn’t know you even existed.