Digital declutter: LinkedIn Groups
As you know, I’m on a mission to declutter my home and move towards a more decluttered life. So today, I took a look at my LinkedIn account. I’m an expert on LinkedIn and have even written several books on the subject, but that doesn’t mean that my account isn’t cluttered.
My focus today was to examine my LinkedIn groups. You’re allowed to join up to 100 different groups on LinkedIn, and the members of each group become part of your LinkedIn network. For this reason, I tend to advise people to join the maximum number of groups, as this helps you get found in LinkedIn search results. However, I’ve changed direction in the last year but my LinkedIn groups don’t reflect this, for example, I’m still a member of several training groups.
To navigate to your Groups, you need to click on the Interests link and then choose Groups. You then have the option of Group highlights, My Groups and Discover. In my groups, you can see a list of all the groups that you are a member of, with the most active groups shown first. For this reason, I started at the bottom of the list, looking at those groups that are most inactive, and applied my personal rule book for keeping groups:
- it must validate some part of my profile
- it must be part of an offline network that I’m a member of
- it must be relevant to any of my activities: decluttering, coaching, writing, social media marketing and entrepreneurship
- it must help me develop my business for example be a place where potential clients hang out
Of the groups that I’ve kept, only two don’t meet that criteria, and that’s because they are two groups that help veterans. Whilst I no longer do LinkedIn profile assessments or optimisation, I can still offer advice on how to improve profiles.
My short declutter means that I’m now a member of only 26 groups. I could declutter more, but that would potentially impact on where I appear on search results.
If you want to declutter your LinkedIn or Facebook groups, create a rule book for yourself that you can use to help you decide on which groups you stay a member of. Where groups have a similar niche, then look at how active the group is. I don’t mean the number of discussions, but how much interaction there is on those groups. Many groups have loads of discussions that are purely group members posting their latest blog post, but if there is no interaction, then that could indicate that the culture of the group is to post content only.