How LinkedIn Groups are Putting Associations in Danger

As the leading agent of HyperCompetition, LinkedIn Groups (LIG’s) are fast becoming the biggest threat to Associations. Why? They’re free, international and, most importantly, few Association Executives think they’re dangerous.

Two major factors have prompted this growing threat:

1. Australia has reached critical mass on LinkedIn – the speed of the growth to 5 million members is extraordinary. More importantly, 40% of all members of LinkedIn now visit daily.

2. The new Group functionality; there are now over 2 million LIG’s and they have recently started to ‘come of age’.

Until recently, droves of people would regularly register with Associations for a variety of reasons, without needing to be particularly active. Meanwhile, LIG’s presented no danger back then, being very basic and rarely delivering on their potential. As LinkedIn actively encouraged people to set up LIGs, the market was quickly oversaturated and poorly maintained. We still see this now, with most LIGs offering no value – having too few members and contributors, and very little useful content.

But here’s the issue:

Because so many Groups were unengaged and provided little content of interest, the conclusion drawn by many Association executives was that they presented no threat to membership, and probably never would. We’re now seeing just how dangerous an assumption this was: as HyperCompetition booms, the game is changing significantly.

We analysed the biggest 300 groups in March 2013, and less than 2% of these giants were engaged. By May 2014 however, over 21% of the top 1000 LIGs were engaging their members, and this speed of development is increasing. So, why aren’t Associations responding to this growth?

As the frontrunner in business networking, there’s no doubt that LinkedIn – and in particular LIGs – pose a major threat to Associations. They also present huge opportunities. For good reasons…

LIG’s offer their owners almost unlimited access to members. It acts like a ‘self-updating’ CRM, with more up-to-date and detailed information than any in-house system can match. This means the Group owner can easily and efficiently segment its members, then tailor messages accordingly.

In recent work we did with a large Association, virtually all of their new members were in the LIG before they became paid members. In fact it was 85.4% of all new members, and new members increased for the first time in years. Not a bad marketing funnel!

But before creating a LIG, there are two things you should know:

1. Size matters. Without a ‘critical mass’ of members the group can’t deliver value, but size varies by profession and industry, from 500 members upwards. For example, in the HR or marketing professions, a critical mass is well over 20,000 members; conversely, for a Group designed for say ceramic engineers, 500 may be sufficient.

Once a number of LIG’s have reached critical mass, it can take a significant investment to successfully launch a competing group. LinkedIn gives a huge advantage to the big LIG’s: it lists them in the search results in order of size, and most people click on the biggest couple first so new groups are effectively hidden. In addition, there’s only a certain number of communities we want to join, and we won’t join more if existing ones are meeting our needs.

2. But it is engagement, not size that makes a Group powerful. Currently the only measure of engagement is the number of comments posted, as there are no statistics provided on visitor numbers or length of stay. The prime statistic to measure is Average Comments per Discussion, and most large Groups have ratios of less than one. This means that nearly every post by a member is ignored, and the Group is filled with a flow of spam. But, our research shows, 78% of large Groups are currently not engaging their members, nor are they well advanced on offering Association type services.

This can change quickly, and it has already begun to. In our next post we will discuss which industries are most in danger.

To access the first post on the topic: http://ow.ly/Dy9Q5

Regards, Toby