This one comes with a bit of a confession on my part as I didn’t realize this had happened until I was in the middle of an event showing some of the better (and non-spammy) ways to use LinkedIn for marketing.
(But you always have to stay on your toes with LinkedIn – Thursdays seem to be their prime days for making changes, and that means that when you walk into an event on Friday, things might have changed considerably overnight;-)
In any case – I was explaining how to set things so that group “summary-of-activity” messages get delivered daily, weekly, or never at all – and realized that for some reason, the group was currently set not to give me any messages at all.
That’s not what I remembered setting it as, so I thought it would be an interesting investigation and overview…
Group settings
First and foremost – every LinkedIn user has individual control over each group that he or she belongs to.
This control is managed from a “My Settings” screen that can be found under “My Groups” – “Group Name” – “Go To” – “Settings”, or within an individual group tab and “More” – “My Settings”.
The settings are just for that group, so if you belong to more than one, be sure to check each.
Available options
Let’s have a look at them:
Visibility Settings
Group Logo
This determines if the group logo is visible on your profile. Now – I’d like to suggest that you may belong to groups that you don’t want to make visible on your profile.
Let’s suppose that you happen to belong to a group for people trying to find a job.
If you’ve got a job, you don’t really want to display that logo – and if you don’t have a job, you still may not want to display it!-) But you’d definitely like to belong to the group. So just set it so the group logo does not display on your profile.
Contact Settings
Contact Email
When there is activity in this group, you can direct it to any account that you have added to your LinkedIn profile. I don’t have a particular reason to change this from my main LinkedIn email setting, but you may choose to do so.
Digest Email
Here’s where you configure how often to get notices about activity – daily (if any), weekly, or never.
Some groups you don’t really care about monitoring, and others you may want to stay on top of.
Announcements
The manager of a group is able to send a weekly announcement – do you want to accept it? I’d suggest “no” only if the manager has abused this privilege.
Member Messages
And lastly, you can allow other group members to send you a message. This is a great feature for you to reach out with, and for others as well. If you want others to be receptive to you, you ought to be receptive to them, so I’d recommend this as well. (And understand if a specific group causes too much unwelcome traffic – just turn the one group off)
Lastly – the page points to “Network Updates” settings – those configure if and how many different updates are shown on your LinkedIn home page. Those settings are global for your account.
My recommendation – go through all of the groups you belong to and at least review your existing settings.
Changed settings
I was confident that I had changed only some of my group settings to not get updates, and left the others alone (so that I would receive messages).
But during this session, I found one group had been configured not to send me anything.
Afterwords, I checked others, and found several more were also set differently than I remembered. Another user also shared a similar (and equally hard to verify) tale.
I’m not sure how, but my best guess is that LinkedIn changed the “default” and went through the system and everywhere it found the old default (unmodified by the user) it changed those settings to the new default.
And let’s recall here – I have no hard factual basis for this guess (because I have no connection to the company), and it is an educated guess – it’s just that the evidence that I see leads me to it…
The important thing is that something I thought I had set appeared different. (for whatever reason)
So check your settings!
But the advice I have at the end of the day is that you should revisit your group settings and check.
It’s possible that a group that you enjoyed monitoring through those emails isn’t sending them anymore.
Fun and exciting
LinkedIn has never had an effective process to communicate to the user population. So it’s difficult to say if they meant to do this or it just happened.
While you might get a notice once in a while, it just isn’t the company’s style – but hey – that’s why you keep coming back here, right?
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your tips on Groups. I am currently running a group and here are my questions on Groups:
How do send out Events just to my group? Announcements?. Is there limit on Announcements?
When will Linkedin create a tab for Events? In groups, Discussion just is not the same?
How can I use Sub-Groups better?
Bob Roman
pctrainerbob@yahoo.com
President of Milwaukee Education and Training Organization, a Group on Linkedin and a live group in Milwaukee, WI.
Bob,
Glad to hear you’re enjoying the site;-)
The “Events” application and “Groups” are two separate things. And Events are not fully part of LinkedIn – it’s a separate (and optional) application… So you can’t have a group-event.
If it’s ok to let people outside the group know about the event, you could create the event and send an announcement out to the group about it. (see below) In that case it would still be viewable under events, but all your group members would know about it.
Group announcements happen under the “manage” tab of your group. You can send out one per week. The system sends it as a message to each group member and also posts it under the discussion tab. Individuals can “opt out” of group messages (as noted in the post above), so take care not to send useless messages to your group members.
Can’t help you on timing – it still seems like LinkedIn is shaking out the new applications, so they probably have a list of changes internally, but they don’t really share those with us outsiders;-)
And I’m going to defer sub-groups to a later post. Just stay tuned for that.
steve
Hi Steve:
Just came across your blog and I’ve already found it valuable. On a somewhat related note, is there a way to find out how active, or quiet, a group is BEFORE you join?
In other words, I guess I could join willy-nilly any group that looks like it matches my interests, but it might be helpful to know which ones are active and which aren’t to help inform that decision.
Geoff,
Glad to have you here!
Unfortunately, no, you can’t see the activity level of the group before you join.
There’s a limit of 50 groups, so ask to get in the ones that look interesting. If you go to your groups tab, it should be easy enough to “leave” groups that don’t mesh at any time.
steve
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