For awhile now, B2B Marketers have been caught in a bit of a Catch-22. Our community of B2B professionals are very well represented on LinkedIn. And, it’s fairly easy to set up a topic-oriented group on LinkedIn. However, there’s not much you can do to spread the word about your group to recruit members.  And, worse, once you build your group, you can’t do much for them. There’s really no way to share information or gather feedback.

Facebook, on the other hand, offers a much more “social” atmosphere and once you create a group, you can not only spread the word but actually interact with your members. Seems sort of obvious. I mean, isn’t that what a group is for? Unfortunately, in my situation, test engineers and other IT professionals just  don’t seem to use Facebook. It’s been frustrating because we’ve seen our LinkedIn group grow very quickly without much recruiting, and it’s a very qualified group of the professionals but we simply cannot engage with the members as a group.

Well, at last, LinkedIn has responded with the ability to interact with the members of your group!  They just sent out this email to Group managers:

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

Thanks LinkedIn! Look forward to growing with you.