Groups

Overview

Start or join a conversation with groups on LinkedIn.

• Quickly discover the most popular discussions in your professional groups.
• Have an active part in determining the top discussions by liking and commenting.
• Follow the most influential people in your groups by checking the Top Influencers board or clicking their profile image to see all their group activity.
• See both member-generated discussions and news in one setting.
• Easily browse previews of the last three comments in a discussion.
• Find interesting discussions by seeing who liked a discussion and how many people commented.

LinkedIn members can now discover, share and participate in a number of professional conversations happening in their industry and areas of interest.

All existing groups will remain members-only unless the group owner proactively chooses to enable public discussions. If that happens, all group members will be informed when they visit the group.

Discussions created in a group before it switches to open will go into the group’s members-only, read-only Archive. They cannot be seen by anyone who is not a member of the group.

LinkedIn’s new moderation toolkit helps you keep the quality level high within group discussions.

• Managers and moderators can now delete inappropriate posts right from their email box using the new option “Send me an email for each new discussion” in More > My Settings.
• Managers and moderators can now delete inappropriate comments right from their email box by clicking “Delete” within any followed-discussion email alert.
• We are introducing the ability for members to flag items as inappropriate – initially this is a way for us to gather important data and in a few weeks, this capability will enable members to flag items into the moderation queue or, if you choose, delete the content outright after an adjustable number of flags.
• The moderation queue will allow group managers to decide how many member flags can delete a thread or a comment.
• Managers can now restrict the move-to-Jobs capability to themselves. Users still will be able to “Flag-as-job” to move an item into the moderation queue.
• Very-low-connection users will now be flagged as such in groups’ request-to-join queues.
• Very-low-connection users will no longer be admitted directly to open-access groups but routed to the groups’ request-to-join queues.

LinkedIn’s new Groups introduces the first of several changes to featured discussions:

• “Featured Discussions” are now called “Manager’s Choice” in response to user confusion about whether group managers or LinkedIn featured the discussion.
• Original user discussions, user-submitted articles, and RSS items can all be featured by clicking “Add to Manager’s Choice” from the top of any item’s detail page.
• The top Manager’s Choice will be visible in a module on the right side of the most visited page within groups: the discussion detail page.
• The top Manager’s Choice, rather than the top five, appears on the group homepage in a module on the right side of the page.
• Managers can re-order up to 10 Manager’s Choice discussions from the “See All” link in the Manager’s Choice module.
• Manager’s Choice discussions will soon see top billing in the group digest email.

There are many ways to invite people to join your group:

• Send invitations to your LinkedIn connections and other contacts who are not on LinkedIn. Those who accept your invitations will automatically become members of your group.
• Allow your members to invite people to the group to help it grow faster. Simply turn on member invitations in your group settings, and recipients who accept their invitations will automatically become members of the group.
• Easily send out mass invitations by uploading a .CSV file of your email addresses.