Archive for October, 2008

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If you want to join a Company Group on LinkedIn, you’ll need to have two things in place:

1.  You must list your current position at that company in your linked in profile, and

2.  You must have a confirmed work email address (with the domain name for your company).  You’ll need to confirm this email address.  To do that, go to Account & Settings, Settings, Personal Information, and then select Email Addresses.  Follow the simple instructions to go through the confirmation process.

Groups are designed for interaction – for the benefit of all.  As a member of a LinkedIn group you can change your settings so that you can allow fellow group members to contact you without using a referral.  Go to your homepage to modify your settings.

Sometimes you invite people to your group, yet they never seem to appear in your Request to Join list.  There’s an easy way to solve this:

1. The invitee may have just joined LinkedIn and they haven’t yet confirmed their email address.  As soon as they activate their account, then they’ll show up for approval on your Request to Join list.
2. On occasion, you might mistakenly invite them to your personal network as opposed to your group – so they definitely wouldn’t appear on the “Join” list.

Finally, there could be an email deliverability problem.  The individual who just joined may have not received the email for confirming their original LinkedIn account.  Again, until they confirm that link, they won’t be able to do anything in LinkedIn, including joining your group.  In this case, you might suggest they use a different email account and see if they can confirm using the new email address.

It’s really easy to invite people to join your group.  Simply send them an email that includes a link to your group.  You can set up a list of pre-approved people who can join your group.  So if they accept the invitation, they’ll be added automatically.  If someone who is not on your pre-approved list clicks the “accept,” then they’ll be placed in a “pending” status until you formally approve their request.

If you’re managing a LinkedIn Group, you have the option of using a generic email address as opposed to your personal email address.  This convenient option was added so that if you needed to add another administrator or group manager, then they could use this generic email address.  You don’t need to use it, but it’s convenient if you’re sharing Group management responsibilities with someone else.

You’ve started a group. Now it’s time to start filling it up. Make sure to upload a list of people you want to pre-approve for the group before you send out the group invitation.  When you do that, then they can automatically be added to the group when they accept the invitation.  If you don’t do that, then anyone accepting will be placed in a pending state until you approve their request for membership.

You can pre-approve members to join your group – even if they aren’t currently members of LinkedIn.  When they do join LinkedIn, they’ll automatically be invited to join your group.

If you manage a group and you were wondering how many members you can have, the default size is 1,000 members.  As with most things, there are exceptions.  If you want to request an increase in your group size, you can put in a request by contacting customer service.