In a recent posting titled, “Manage Your Career on LinkedIn“, our readers discovered a great deal of information about LinkedIn, the social network where over 85 million members in 200+ countries including executives from all Fortune 500 companies are coming together to further their businesses on the web in 2011.
In today’s posting, we will take our readers through the advantages and disadvantages of LinkedIn’s new “Open Groups”, as well as providing a quick guide to converting an existing group to an “Open Group” … without sounding overly redundant or compromising our readers integrity.
The Upside
On Dec. 20th, 2010, Ian McCarthy posted an article titled, “LinkedIn Open Groups makes it easier to find and share professional conversations” on the official LinkedIn blog. Ian opened the post with the following statement:
“Our members have long been requesting a forum for open professional conversations that they can share with the wider web. So I am very pleased to announce the launch of Open Groups on LinkedIn.”
It is true that this feature has been long awaited, and immediate advantages to the new Open Groups appear to be that all Open Group discussions are now available to any visitor on the web, are indexed by all major search engines and can be shared via most any popular social networking platform outside of LinkedIn.
One can assume that there will be immediate SEO advantages coupled with Open Groups as well as an immediate influx of useful data being made available through newly-opened discussions. Essentially, LinkedIn has released their answer to the Twitters and Facebooks of the world in terms of publicly available content.
The Downside
Judging by the comments posted on the official LinkedIn blog, several group administrators have voiced their frustration with previous discussions being archived, thus being difficult to locate quickly as they had before. While this is a moot point, it does at least merit acknowledgment from any group admin prior to making the switch.
Another downside, if one chooses to call it that, is that there is now a ‘Featured Groups’ section in the ‘Groups Directory’. This alone is not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing, but for many admins who wish to have their group featured, it could be a long wait…
Didn’t we promise to share with our readers how to convert their existing group to a new ‘Open Group’? Yes we did. As stated on help.linkedin.com …
- Click on “Groups” found in the top navigation bar of the home page. This will take you to the “My Groups” page.
- Move your cursor over “Go to” under the appropriate group name and click “Manage”.
- Click “Learn About Open Groups”
- Read the message
- Click on “Switch to Open Group”
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Coming up next … #FollowFriday!
