--- title: "Are LinkedIn groups for marketers worth joining?" description: "The short answer is no—LinkedIn groups for marketers aren't worth your time. Here's why." image: "https://images.ctfassets.net/lzny33ho1g45/iORF0CVaM9DdDBIS4dz9W/93a56ec07b57ec19b93cb593febbcc8f/linkedin.png" --- # Are LinkedIn groups for marketers worth joining? The short answer is no—LinkedIn groups for marketers aren't worth your time. Here's why. [LinkedIn](https://zapier.com/blog/tips-for-linkedin/) is a gold mine if you're looking for a job, but it's not always a land of milk and honey if you're searching for quality content. Henning Sanden's parody tweet perfectly encapsulates everything some of us hate about the social network: the fluffy "thought leadership," hustle culture, one-statement-per-line posts.  And yet, LinkedIn has a massive number of groups dedicated to sharing advice. Maybe there's something happening in those groups? After lurking in [Slack groups for marketers](https://zapier.com/blog/slack-groups-for-marketers/) for a week, I wondered, "are there pockets of LinkedIn with valuable content for marketers?" And thus, my next experiment began: I would join some LinkedIn groups for marketers to see if I could find some hidden gems. Spoiler alert: I could not. ## Abandon all hope, ye who enter LinkedIn groups I started my search by looking for LinkedIn groups related to "marketing." I expected a lot, but I did not expect _93,000 results_, including four groups on the first page alone with a million or more members.  To make the experiment a bit more manageable, I chose seven groups to observe for a week: 1. [Social Media Marketing Group](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/66325/) 2. [Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Network](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/51822/) 3. [Marketing Executive Network](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2088419/) 4. [Digital Marketing](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/62352/) 5. [Email Marketing Gurus](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2213406/) 6. [Marketing Communication](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/59008/) 7. [Women in Network Marketing](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3378687/) It…didn't go well. Some groups were a bit better than others, but I saw recurring themes that led to a lackluster experience: - **Lots of noise**. The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Network had more than 100 new posts every day—not quite what I need from LinkedIn. There seem to be a lot of entirely unmoderated and enormous LinkedIn groups where anything goes, and the few-and-far-between quality posts are drowned out by wholly irrelevant ones. - **Inactivity**. On the other end of the content spectrum are strangely quiet groups. For example, the Social Media Marketing Group has millions of members, yet only a few posts a month. The Email Marketing Gurus group was a bit more active, but none of the groups I observed existed in the ideal between enough content worth visiting for and total spam. - **Low engagement**. The groups with a manageable number of new daily posts still fell short on engagement. Generally, I noticed that LinkedIn groups for marketers have a lot of people sharing their work without any substantial discussion or interaction in the comments. It's a bit like yelling into a void. I saw occasional posts with engagement, but again, not enough to make me want to go out of my way to check in on the group. - **Cumbersome moderation. **There's definitely a need for group moderators to curate what's allowed. One group I joined took it a bit too far, though, and deleted community posts until only admin content remained. - **Potentially abandoned groups**. Some LinkedIn groups require approval to join. That's not a bad idea, but it makes it hard to tell which are still up and running. I requested to join a few groups and went weeks without a response, so they may not be maintained. ## My advice: don't waste your time There may be some hidden gems if you're willing to slog through enough LinkedIn groups, but I don't think that's the best use of your time as a marketer. Instead, figure out why you wanted to try a LinkedIn group to begin with.  ### Promote your content If you want to promote your own content, build a personal following. Rather than taking the easy (but ineffective) route of dumping your links in LinkedIn groups, take the time to build a following through consistent engagement. Marketers like [Amanda Natividad](https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandanat/recent-activity/shares/) show up consistently to share their experiences, ask questions, and cheer on their peers, which leads to a much more positive and productive experience.   If you're using groups as a [distribution strategy](https://zapier.com/blog/content-distribution-strategy/), be sure to evaluate the quality of any traffic you get to determine if it's worth the time and effort. Here are some other suggestions for how to [streamline your LinkedIn marketing](https://zapier.com/blog/linkedin-marketing-strategy/). ### Create meaningful connections If you're looking to network, you're better off having many one-on-one connections with actual conversations via DM than joining a group of a million other marketers all going their own way. Even in the digital age, [you can't hack your way to a connection](https://zapier.com/blog/networking-through-human-connection/).  ### Learn from other marketers I had a better strike rate for finding active marketing communities on my [investigation into Slack groups](https://zapier.com/blog/slack-groups-for-marketers/). They're not all great, but there are a few that I wholeheartedly recommend, which I can't say about the LinkedIn groups I saw. If you're looking to learn from a group of other folks in similar roles, LinkedIn groups aren't your best bet. ## Use LinkedIn right [LinkedIn](https://zapier.com/blog/why-use-linkedin) can be a huge resource for you as a marketer—both [personally](https://zapier.com/blog/linkedin-banner-ideas/) and as a [marketing tool](https://zapier.com/blog/linkedin-marketing/). Take the time to create excellent content and build your network through engagement, and you'll get way more out of it than you will scrolling through thousands of LinkedIn groups. **Read more: **[What is organic reach?](https://zapier.com/blog/what-is-organic-reach/)