One of the things I like about social media is that as a developing medium it sometimes takes a little creativity to accomplish what you might want. Recently we had a client that engaged us to help drive traffic to their internal jobs postings. One of the first places I thought of posting these opportunities was in the jobs board in LinkedIn groups.
We did a search on industry groups and selected twenty to join. These twenty groups have over 300,000 members. The only thing left to do was to post each job opportunity in each group.
We started with 20 jobs to post and doing simple math meant that posting 20 jobs in 20 groups would require 400 posts to groups to complete . Thats a lot of time that really was not in the budget. Surely there had to be an easier way.
In simpler LinkedIn Times:
When I first started writing my blog I used LinkedIn groups to share my posts, growing my blog from 2,200 visits a month to a high of 50,000. Each time I wrote a post I would then post it in the 50 groups I belonged to. It was a tedious but effective tactic.
Earlier this year LinkedIn made some changes and suddenly you were able to post to the News board of all of your groups with a single post. Unfortunately that functionality disappeared when LinkedIn removed the News boards in groups. Fortunately through trial and error I have been able to find a way to posy one blog post in all of your groups with a single posting.
When 20 x 20 equals 1
So getting back to our client that needed to post their job opportunity in LinkedIn groups, here are the steps we took. The same steps you can use to syndicate your content to all of your groups at once.
Step 1: Create a New Blog
If you already have a blog then you can skip this step. Our client did not have a blog for their job posts and we did not have time to wait for their web developers to implement one so we created a WordPress hosted blog.
Step 2: Add a Share Widget to Your Blog
If we were hosting the blog on our client’s servers we would have access to upload the widget of our choice. With WordPress hosting our blog we were limited to the widgets loaded, so we needed an alternative way to add the Share functionality.
One of the widget options is the Text Widget which allows you to add coding to it to add functionality. We then did a search on Share Content and found the Add to Any site. We created an Add to Any account and then downloaded the Share code for WordPress.com.
Step 3: Add a Text Widget to your Blog Sidebar
We next went to the Widget Administrative panel in the backend of our blog and added a Text Widget to the Sidebar and pasted the WordPress.com Share Code from the Add to Any site. With our Share Widget added to our Sidebar we were ready to share our job blog posts.
Step 4: Go to your Post page and click on the Share button
Now that we had our blog in place, the jobs loaded as posts, and our share widget added we were ready to begin syndicating our content. We went to the homepage of our blog and clicked on the Title Link of the first job we wanted to share. On the post page we then clicked on our Share widget which then opened a page listing the networks available to choose to share to.
From here we’ll use video to show you how easy it is.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHhvgDAmyGs
(If the video does not work click on the following link to view the video in YoutTube: Syndicate Blog Content to LinkedIn Groups)
Hopefully the video helped show how easy it is to use this technique. We had an extra step for our client since the blog posts needed to be put onto the jobs board. Our only option unfortunately was to go into each group and move the posts to the Jobs board by flagging the discussion as a jobs post. Even with having to manually add to the jobs board we were still able to add 6 posts per hour. We estimate that using this technique saved us 6 to 8 hours on this task.
Remember that you want to make sure that the posts you add to LinkedIn groups
1. Are relevant to the group added; and
2. Share value and not simply a sales message.
Good Luck!
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