Be the first in your friends to like itYou know I’m super-active on LinkedIn. So active, in fact, that someone I don’t know made me (without my permission!) the owner of a group she started but was too busy to manage. That group is Social Media International. I’m happy she passed it on to me – it’ll be a fun adventure.
One of the main reasons I think it was too time consuming for her was that she had chosen the setting that makes people submit their discussions for review before posting. I’m too lazy for that – I’d rather let people post whatever they want and deal with issues if they come up. I don’t expect many issues though; people are generally cool when it comes to groups.
So I wanted to let my friends know about my new group. There are a few ways to publicize your LinkedIn group, and the site actually lets you send invitations. Here’s how:
1. Log in and locate the ‘Groups’ tab on the left-hand side of the tool bar. When you hover over that, choose the ‘Your Groups’ tab, just like I’ve done below:
2. When you’ve selected the group you want to invite your connections to. Choose the ‘Manage’ tab in the sub-toolbar. Then, choose the ‘Send Invitations’ tab in the menu on the left-hand side. I’ve marked that in yellow below:
3. Clicking on that brings you to a page with a few ways to send invitations. If you want to send to just a few connections, you can simply type their names in the box there. I wanted to send invitations to all my connections. Unfortunately, just like on Facebook, there’s no way to send something to everybody in one shot. LinkedIn allows you to send invitations to 50 connections at once.
To the right of the little box, click on the little LinkedIn address book icon.
Another screen will pop up and now, you check the box next to each connection’s name until you hit your limit of 50, one by one.
Press the yellow ‘Finished’ button and it’ll prompt you to confirm. Then it’ll take you back to the main page for your group. To continue, click the ‘Manage tab’, then the ‘Send Invitations’ tab: wash, rinse, repeat. Unfortunately, LinkedIn keeps no record of who you’ve already invited, so make a note of who the last person checked was to avoid resending. Tedious, but worth it 
For more Linkedin know-how, read these:
The #1 Thing I Do to Get Clients, Jobs & Web Traffic on LinkedIn
Rapportive Acquired by LinkedIn
My LinkedIn Tips on AmEx Forum
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What a timely article for me. I started a LinkedIn group last week and it’s growing nicely but for some reason I never thought to invite my own connections. I’ll be doing that now!
Our group is the Jewish Women’s Global Network and all interested parties are invited check it out!
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4317778
Btw LinkedIn makes it really difficult to share your group on Facebook! Have you found a solution to this problem Margelit?
BTW I meant I started it last month, not last week!
Of course Facebook and LinkedIn are competitors, especially since Facebook is trying to get BranchOut off the ground. So Facebook isn’t too LinkedIn friendly, but you can find your Facebook friends to connect on LinkedIn manually – painstaking I know. Then invite them using the process above.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t keep track of whom you’ve already invited to your group, so you may want to get the FB friends on there first.
I hope this helps Naomi! Your group is great – everyone’s so active!
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Yes, but I would like to know how to invite new contacts to my group, when I do not know who is new and who has been invited already??!
Great question! I’ll look into it…
Margelit,
have you found a solution?
Actually, no. And I wouldn’t recommend LinkedIn’s customer service either, as they’ve been quite unhelpful.