How to Growth Hack Content Distribution in Linkedin Groups

Yuri Shub

I hear too often, many negative things being said about Linkedin groups’ platform over the years. It’s all spam, there’s zero engagement, you can’t generate traffic from there, etc…

However, in the last 2 years, I’ve been using Linkedin groups to generate more than 10,000 website sessions and more than 1,000 leads for the B2B startup that I worked for, and today for my clients.

Today I’m going to share with you my hack, and you’ll be able to implement it yourself right away.

But before we begin, let me explain to you why I think that LinkedIn groups are such an excellent source for content distribution.

So, there are 3 reasons for that:

1. Linkedin groups are huge. Many have hundreds of thousands of members. But the best part is that these groups are usually also already very segmented to industries. So it gives you the opportunity to generate a lot of targeted traffic.

2. This is the positive end of the two-sided sword. I mean, the spam. Because Linkedin groups are so spammy and have such a low engagement rate, you don’t have to put a lot of effort to get above all that noise.

3. And this is absolutely ridiculous (positively ridiculous). Linkedin will feature your group post in the group members personal feeds as a “Popular conversation” after you generate around 10-15 likes.

Look at this example. So, someone (who don’t even have a profile picture) posted a day ago in a group of more than 250,000 people that I’m a member of, got 13 likes and one comment, and the next day I got it into my feed as a “popular conversation”. This is amazing!

Without further ado, here is all you need to make a successful distribution of your content in Linkedin groups, that will help you possibly generate more traffic and leads to your product or service.

Step 1 – Create a really great piece of content

You need to have helpful content. Write a lengthy blog post that helps your target audience solve a real problem that you know they have. This is an absolute must. Make sure that you do the best with your content.

Step 2 – Find large and segmented groups

Find and join the largest Linkedin groups of a specific industry or theme, that are related to your target audience.

People had joined Linkedin groups ages ago when it all was new, to connect and meet with colleges. Today they continue to consume content from these groups on their LinkedIn feeds each time the log-in, regardless of their engagement with groups content.

For online marketers, search groups about social media, for hoteliers search for hospitality professionals groups, for software engineers search for developers communities. Make sure you joined at least 5 groups of more than 30,000 members.

Step 3 – Create Unique UTM for Each Group

This one is a real game changer: Build dedicated UTM links for each group.

This is necessary to be able to track an measure (on Google Analytics) which groups generate the most traffic, and then take advantage of that by spending more time to engage with that specific group members, connect with them, and make following content more customized for that group.

Use groups ID which you can find in the URL of the group right after the /groups path, and use it at the utm_campaign parameter.

So your final link UTM string will be:
?utm_source=linkedin_groups & utm_medium=social & utm_campaign=[INSERT GROUP ID HERE]

Step 4 – Customize Bitly Links for Each Group

Here’s a spicy tip!

For each unique link, create a unique Bitly URL that includes the group name, followed by the title of your article or eBook or whatever content that you’re sharing.

This important to make your increase trust by giving your links the appearance of something that is unique to this group and approved or affiliated with the admins/moderators.

Finally, it should look like that:
bitly com / The-Small-Business-Owners-Linkedin-Group-How-to-Boost-Offline-Shoppers-Traffic-With-Facebook-Ads

Step 5 – Figure Out When to Post (Wednesdays are great…)

Now I’m really giving you everything, even that I know that those of you who will duplicate my strategy will be competing with me eventually and possibly damaging my performance.

So here it is – trial and error until you find the best hours to share the content.

In some industries, weekends work amazing. Because Linkedin isn’t like Facebook where people logged in all the time. On Linkedin, many people log in only on weekends when they are open to consuming helpful content and catch-up with their industry news.

Bonus 1 – Conversation Titles Are Important

The title that you use for the post is also super important. As it will appear in bold on people feed and will be clickable.

Sometimes I even use emojis on the title to maximize the visibility of the post as it appears on group members feeds.

Bonus 2 – Be patient (for 24 hours…)

The last big tip here is that whenever you believe that it’s your best day to post, post 24 hours before that.

It has to do with Linkedin feed algorithm that has a much less powerful time decay than Facebook’s algorithm.

When you share content on Facebook groups, you see the traffic right away. But on Linkedin, it takes time before your content starts popup on peoples feed.

It usually happens when group members begin to engage (click, like, comment) on your post, and then Linkedin pushes it to other group members feeds as a “popular conversation in {some group}…”

Now if you came so far, and you also want to get a link to a Google Docs Spreadsheet which I use that includes all the UTM links formulas, and even some of the best Linkedin groups that I recommend using, please subscribe to my newsletter (I only use it to send my best stuff) and I will send it to you.