One of the most engaging features of LinkedIn, Groups, has been been refreshed and is starting to roll out to their users, now at 70 million worldwide.

LinkedIn Groups has been a part of the core feature set within the professional social network but, in my opinion, was one of the most under-utilized features.  People tend to belong to a lot of Groups that interest them but don’t necessarily engage with them on a constant basis.  One of the reasons is that it took multiple clicks to start a discussion within a group.  With this update LinkedIn is trying to put the focus onto creating conversations by making engagement easier and a key focus of the Groups.

Besides putting more of a focus on conversations, LinkedIn has also added new features including the ability to “Like”, “Pass”, or “Comment” on a discussion taking place within the group.  This will help to bubble up the top conversations within a group.  What I like the most about this is that it will make it quicker to drop in to LinkedIn for a few minutes, jump around to a few Groups, check out what’s going on, engage and bounce back out.  Prior to this update that is what one of the discouraging factors for me to using LinkedIn Groups.  I always felt there was a lot of value in them but it was a time suck to search through the discussion threads in all of the different groups to find the conversations that I found useful or wanted to be a part of.  That all changes now.

Here is a video demoing the new features to help explain it all…

This update makes me even more excited about LinkedIn.  It is a network that I find huge value in but, admittedly, don’t spend a lot of time in.  I tend to spend most of my time over on Twitter (follow me) or Facebook (friend me) and LinkedIn would always come in a distant third.  However, now I’m going to make it a point to spend more time engaging and using LinkedIn more effectively.

Are we connected yet on LinkedIn? If not, it would be awesome to connect and you can also keep updated with New Marketing Labs by following us over there.

Do you find LinkedIn Groups useful? Do you think you’ll spend more time hanging out around Groups with the update?

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