LinkedIn is still gaining momentum in the B2B world.

With over 70 million professionals holding profiles, it makes good business sense for companies to start looking at how to use LinkedIn as an everyday business solution.

I thought it was interesting that even Chris Brogan would check in on LinkedIn, if there was a location-based component.  His target audience of clients lives there and check-ins in that context might result in new opportunities.

It’s important that company leaders realize that it will take a coordinated and dedicated human effort over time to see any results from tapping in to LinkedIn.  Your company may even consider assigning a group of personnel to spend a portion of their time monitoring, researching and actively participating in the many groups and subgroups available.

If you’re ready to dedicate more time and effort, you can always build your own group and subgroups inside the network.  This is appealing because there is literally no cost involved, outside of time and energy.  But make no mistake, the amount of time and energy that goes into successfully facilitating a group is high.

Be prepared.

How To Build a Customer-Centric LinkedIn Group

One approach companies can use to leverage LinkedIn Groups is to focus on customer centricity.  These groups are essential hubs of conversation.  If executed wisely, facilitating the right conversations (that provide value to members) works to build deeper relationships with customers.  The end result is increased customer retention and a greater potential for referrals.

There are a few important things you need to consider before your pull the trigger:

• Who is your niche audience for the group?
• Does that specific group already exist?
• What type of conversation will help them do their job better?

Once you’ve answered those questions, begin mapping out the objectives of your conversation.  A good way to start is by solidifying what you want the members to take away from the conversation.  Work from the desired result and build backwards.

While you are working through this, also begin familiarize yourself with the recently updated LinkedIn Group features.  It’s a good idea to visit other groups and look at what they are having success with.  In most cases, you might even be able to connect with other group managers who can share experience and give you insider tips.

Case Study: Let’s Talk Blood Donor Recruitment

Incept is a conversational marketing firm that helps blood centers recruit and maintain blood donors to keep blood supplies on shelves.  They are a client of my firm, Social Business Strategies.

Blood donor recruiting has its challenges, and most of the blood donation groups on LinkedIn today offer a hub of conversations between professionals who donate blood.  While that’s great and folks from Incept do participate in those groups, they do little to help Incept’s customer base of blood center professionals.

In building out a new customer-centric group, where Incept can bring together blood center pros, our conversation goals are simple:

• Connect niche LinkedIn users who work in blood centers across the country and have a focus on donor recruitment
• Build a resource to uncover real issues that blood center personnel are facing today, and share “how to” knowledge to help the members solve problems
• Create opportunities for relationships between blood center personnel, industry providers and the team at Incept

LinkedIn Search Optimization

In setting up the group, we knew we wanted to rank highly in LinkedIn’s Group search results for phrases like blood donor recruitment, blood centers, and even donor recruiting.  Using correct keyword placement and density in the title, summary and description is helping to get the Group indexed highly by LinkedIn’s unique crawlers.

With that, one of the challenges we needed to overcome was to maintain Incept’s branding (developed by Next Level Thinking) while making sure that the most prominent keywords were placed towards the front of group titles.

To get there, NLT created a group logo that called out the “Let’s Talk” portion of the brand theme, placing “blood donor recruitment” towards the front of the Group title in LinkedIn.

The Incept brand tie-in was deliberately minimal, with only the type font and colors being used in the logo.  We made this decision to visually combat the potential perception that the group is sales-focused.  The critical factor is delivering on that promise by staying mindful of how Incept’s team participates.

How To Use Auto Response Messages in LinkedIn Groups

Meet Timothy Johnson.  He’s on the human business team at Incept, as the lead content engineer.

In this video, Tim discusses how he’s using some of the automated response messages in the LinkedIn Group to make it easier to respond to each person interested in joining the conversation.

(Side note: This video was shot and uploaded directly to YouTube from my Sprint EVO 4G.)

What else would you suggest, related to building a customer-centric LinkedIn Group?

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