LinkedIn has recently launched a new statistics product for Groups that is available for free to all LinkedIn members, whether you have a premium account or not. However, with LinkedIn group statistics, the information is available to everyone, not just group admins. In this way, you can more accurately judge whether a particular group is right for you to join, or which groups you should focus your attention on more.
As with any analytics offering though, the information is only as useful as what you decide to do with it. For many, a LinkedIn Group may be used for networking, to promote events, as an extension of a business or simply a place to extend your particular interest area and generate discussion. However, if you're using LinkedIn groups, I think you'll find the overview interesting, to show how you can make the most of the information LinkedIn is providing you with.
Access statistics
First, to navigate to the group statistics, simply go to any group and click on 'group statistics' under 'more':
Look for Industry breakdown
Within the demographics section of statistics, you can access a number of breakdowns, including seniority level, function (marketing, sales etc.), location and industry. While if you're using LinkedIn Groups to generate leads, you might want to search by seniority level or function. I think the most useful way to use this section is to analyse the industry breakdown of group members.
This can enable you to tailor your activities. So if you're looking to generate leads for example, you might change your approach for a group that is dominated by a particular sector, such as marketing. You might choose to share different information or interact differently based on the dominant sector. Members that work in online marketing for example will be interested in different information than those who work in Public Relations.
This information is available by clicking into 'demographics' and then choosing 'Industry'. The dashboard will also show you a summary of which is the most popular industry within the group:
Ignore growth, focus on activity
While LinkedIn provides you with an interesting breakdown of the group growth, you shouldn't get too distracted with this number. Growth of a group doesn't necessarily give you much of an indication of whether or not a group is worth joining, particularly given that LinkedIn Groups are more of a niche offering that Facebook Pages for example, so you would typically see a lower level of growth.
What you should be looking at however, is the activity level within a group. This will help you to see whether the members of the group are actually interacting with each other, and whether this will provide you with new networking and business opportunities.
Information shown within this section includes jobs postings, discussions, comments and promotions posted. Comments and discussions is worth particular focus :
Look for discussion trends
As well as showing you the overall level of activity within a group, you can actually take this information one step further and use it to optimise your activity within a group. When looking at the summary graph on the right, shown above, you can drill down into this more, by hovering over any point in the graph. This will bring up the particular date and the individual number of discussions:
Here you should look for particular trends. If you notice a peak in discussions around a particular date, try and see what happened in the group then, or what external factors might have affected this. If you see particular patterns repeated like, for example, peaks in discussions around the time of industry conferences, you'll know that interacting with the group then is going to be more worthwhile. Of course, your activity within the group shouldn't be completely guided by analytics, but it can be a good indicator of how to make the most of the time you invest in LinkedIn.
Join groups at conference time or business trips
A useful way of using group statistics, is to look at the best groups to join by location, which can be timed when you might be away at a conference or on a business trip. By looking at the location breakdown within a group, under the demographics dashboard, you can see which locations the majority of members make up:
In this way, you can help to take your LinkedIn activity 'offline' a lot more, establishing connections on a geographical basis. While you can't unfortunately filter down to see the individual members within a location (a feature I think is generally lacking, though is understandably absent for privacy reasons), you can still tailor your networking activity off the back of this. If you're going to a conference in New York yet the group you're looking at has very few members based there, you know it might not be the best group to focus your time.
Now that this information is available within LinkedIn, I recommend using it when joining new groups, or looking at the existing groups you've joined, but it should be used as an indicator or guide, rather than letting the statistics provided drive your activity too much, as it's all about the real value you get from a group, which sometimes a graph just can't tell you.
