Over the last years, professionals have gotten used to gathering in many places: Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, obviously, Facebook groups often, but also Slack workspaces, Discord servers, Quora, WhatsApp private groups, Telegrams, and many more.
It’s been a long time since LinkedIn users would feel shy to ask strangers to connect and would use groups to network instead. Does that mean the days of the LinkedIn groups are over? We don’t think so.
LinkedIn Groups can still be used to find like-minded professionals, and the more niche the topic, the better. Let’s see how you can get the most out of these groups in 2022, and how to do so.
How to search for the LinkedIn groups where your best leads are?
The first step to generating leads from LinkedIn group followers is to find good groups. For the practical side of things, this is how you search for groups on LinkedIn:
- Go to LinkedIn
- In the navigation bar, search for your topic of interest
- Filter results by limiting to “Groups”
Make sure to use the most niche, targeted keywords possible at first in other to find the smallest, most focused communities around your issue. Not the other way around. If you’re selling an email software, for instance, move your way up from:
“Email marketing automation softwares”, to “email marketing automation”, to “email marketing”.
The first two results alone account for 33 and 205 LinkedIn groups. More than enough to get you started.
Now that you’re facing a list of groups, which one should you pick? Here are a few tell-tale signs to keep in mind:
Reasonable size. Groups with too many people are not a good choice because they’re not focused enough. Let’s say we’re looking for a group about “email marketing”. There is a 400k followers LinkedIn group about it, but also SEO, SEM, affiliate marketing, and way too many other things. Rather than the big one, look for experts in their domains. In this example, the 32k followers “Email Marketing Gurus” seems much better.
Good activity. The next thing to check is whether the group is active. How many people are being active over the last few days? Many LinkedIn groups have acquired a significant following years ago, but are virtually dead now.
Quality content. Is only the group admin active and self-promoting his stuff, or are members interacting with one another? Do people comment on other people’s posts? Are only links being shared, or do people ask genuine questions and get thought-out answers? LinkedIn groups are not for advertisement, so don’t lose your time with those and keep searching until you find a quality group.
How to use extract your leads from the LinkedIn Groups Followers list
The beauty of using LinkedIn Groups for lead-generation is that you don’t have to create content! LinkedIn Groups is the place where your leads gather and all you have to do is to find their contact information and reach out to them.
You already have everything you need to engage in a discussion: Their name and a great reason to break the ice: You both being in the same group. Since reaching out manually to each LinkedIn group follower is slow, we came up at TexAu with a way for you to automate that process. It goes like this:
Step 1. Extract LinkedIn Group Followers to a spreadsheet. Our LinkedIn Group Member automation allows you to simply input a LinkedIn Group URL and will extract them automatically. Keep in mind that the number of followers you can extract from a LinkedIn group is limited by LinkedIn. The bad news is that you’ll never be able to extract more than a few thousand LinkedIn group followers. The good news is that those followers will be the most recent ones, which is good because it means they’ve been active recently.
Step 2. Send them a connection request mentioning the group. Data shows the acceptance rate of LinkedIn connections from members of the same group is extremely high, so don’t overthink it. Use our LinkedIn Send Message automation to automatically send a DM to each member of the LinkedIn Group. A casual “Hello #{firstName}, I noticed your profile on #{groupName} and would love to connect with other #{something about the group topic}”.
Step 3. Extract their emails. Once you’re connected with your prospects, you have access to their email address. You can automatically extract those with LinkedIn Profile Scraper. It’s another of our automation tools, and it’ll extract all the data available on your prospect’s LinkedIn profile, email included.
Keep exploring
If you’re not lucky with LinkedIn groups, they are many other ways to find places where your potential customers are gathering: In the search results, amongst the following of thought leaders, in the comment or like a section of some posts, and that’s just on LinkedIn.
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