Are LinkedIn Groups Still Relevant?

LinkedIn company pages seem to be constantly improving.  Since this post last year, company pages have gotten even better with seamless tools for sharing from personal profiles and content administration.  Groups on the other hand have been largely sidelined, both in updates and in the platforms navigation.  LinkedIn recently provided an update for groups but in many cases the improvement actually makes groups more irrelevant rather than re-defining their purpose.

LinkedIn group usage has been in decline since 2015.  While this article points to many potential causes for that, my thoughts are that the primary detractor from group pages is that the improvement to company pages made groups largely redundant.

Before the company pages were so well defined, groups were often the best platform to deliver company content to a client or prospect base.  As the company pages administrative and user experiences improved, there was less and less need to use groups as company communication platforms.  As content and interaction moved to company pages, many company-centric group pages drastically reduced content and interaction resulting in them becoming ghost towns.

So a revamp sounds like a good opportunity for digital marketers to reinvigorate a languishing group page right?  In some cases that might be true, but for lingering company-centric group pages it seems like this might be the death knell.

The revamped groups add many useful features but most of those are rehashed tools that already exist for company pages.  If group pages are losing ground because company pages have improved, making them more alike actually makes groups more irrelevant.

So is it time for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches to pull the plug on their LinkedIn group page?  If you have been duplicating content on your company page, then probably yes.  But if your group is focused on a specific topic or shared interest, then it might be a good time to reinvigorate it.

For example, if a sales training company is placing announcements and offers that already exist on their company page or could be easily transitioned there, then the group isn’t really serving a unique purpose.  In that case make a post that the group is going to be discontinued and redirect the group members to follow the company page.

However, if a sales training company has a group page for sales professionals in their city that features tactics and local events, that group would be well suited to use the new updates.  The sales trainers can continue to share their tactics but also collect events from the members and interact with the user base on professional development opportunities.

Company pages and group pages are overlapping more than they ever have.  If you can’t clearly define different purposes between your company and group page, and have supporting content to illustrate those stated differences, it might be a good time to let the group page lapse.