5 LinkedIn Groups for Social Media Professionals – First Look at the Searchable Directory

So now that LinkedIn has allowed search for groups, group functionality has finally become useful, I think. While before today you had to browse profiles of other users to discover some groups you might be interested in joining, now you can actually perform a search to find the interesting groups.

Availability of search within groups was announced 3 days ago and the feature went live today. In fact, it is an interesting approach since I've never seen a feature announced publicly, with Mashable publishing their post a few hours before the post on the LinkedIn blog was even published. Are we seeing an embargo broken again? Maybe, I can only guess here.

But anyway this is a long-awaited move and it was definitely about time they made it available - with over 90,000 groups on the network. So now that the search has been rolled out, I have taken a look at it to locate some groups that might be potentially useful for social media professionals. Keep in mind that on LinkedIn the word "useful" should be interpreted in terms of who you can connect to. And the power of LinkedIn groups is the ability to contact fellow members directly without the cumbersome process of invitations by mutual contacts or - better yet - without the need of purchasing the premium account.

Right after the initial release, the directory of groups on LinkedIn allowed you to do some basic search by categories (those are alumni, corporate, conference, networking, non-profit, and professional) but our focus will be to see what we can find in all the categories for social media professionals. The direct search for "social media" returned a total of 166 results (which is not many so rush over there if you think you could be better off with a relevant group of your own). But the problem with the groups is that even with this number there are really only a few that seem relevant at all. So I have chosen only 5 of them to join:

Social Media Marketing - group with over 2,000 marketers trying to sell their products to each other. Must be amazing, really!

Social Media Today - a group that can be very hard to identify for what it is, positioning itself as the group for "The Web's Best Thinkers on Social Media and Web 2.0". I wonder how the best thinkers qualified to join so I could not help but send my application to join.

Web 2.0 - a group with a very familiar name to anyone reading Profy now but strangely it only has less than 900 members so I think everyone should apply to join the group at least to avoid the impression that web 2.0 is under-populated.

Brandhackers - another group for marketers striving to build their brands using various social media tools.

New Media, Social Media, and Social Networking Participants - a group that describes itself using a long list of web 2.0 tools that its members presumably use. The short list of users (only 245 as of my writing) shows that either we overestimate the tools' usage, or the group owner is a poor social media participant himself and is not really able to promote even the group.

So these are actually the only groups that at least promise something at all by their names and short descriptions that you can view before you join. The majority of the other groups are either created by social media consultants to promote their own brands (where you will hardly find any person you could really be interested in contacting) or by local groups of social media professionals working in Turkey or in Italy (which are probably only worth joining if you are local yourself). The only refreshing aspect for me was that among groups' owners I have not seen any familiar names that I bump into everywhere I go within this rather closed community of technology bloggers and startups owners. But the general impression that there is only a handful of groups actually worth joining may prove that it is not all that good, even though refreshing.

But anyway I think we will soon see a rapid increase in the number of groups now that the directory is searchable and chances of someone discovering your group are much higher. I for one have created a group for Profy friends which is pending approval right now. But if you already have any experience with some of the groups I've mentioned, share it in the comments for us not to join the groups that are pointless. I think it is really important to choose rather carefully once you make the decision to join this or that group not to expose yourself to spam so I will keep you updated if any of the groups I've mentioned proves to be spammy once they let me in.