Wether you are a regular Dux-Soup user or a newcomer, you will have one thing in common — you’ll want to leverage LinkedIn in the best way to find the right people to connect with. There is a variety of ways to search for relevant people by using different filters that LinkedIn provides such as job title, industry, location etc., but did you know that you can use LinkedIn Groups to find new contacts also?

Many marketers like to attend networking events and conferences with 100s if not 1000s of people in the same room (don’t worry I’m going to get back to LinkedIn Groups with this point). They are attracted to the opportunity of finding a lot of like-minded people in the same place. If you are trying to build connections or sell your product then this surely is the perfect environment to be in.

However, I beg to differ. From attending a lot of networking events and conferences, you feel like you are very active and busy but in the end, leave the event with 3–4 business cards and very little to show for it. My advice to you is to apply the mindset of targeting like-minded people, but do it digitally, through LinkedIn Groups (told you I would get back to the point).

LinkedIn Groups are closed communities of people who have common interests and backgrounds, similar to networking events. However, the main difference is that once you are part of a LinkedIn Group, you can use Dux-Soup to connect with people in the group, instead of having to be stuck listening to a sales pitch from a loudmouth at a conference.

Dux-Soup for LinkedIn Groups

I apologise in advance here because by the time you get to the end of this blog, you are going to be cross with me for not writing about this technique sooner. This will save you a lot of time and get you amazing results!

Step 1 — Finding LinkedIn Groups

1. There are two ways to find LinkedIn Groups and both have different advantages. The first step is to do the following:

On the top right of your LinkedIn browser, click on ‘Work’:

Then from the dropdown click on ‘Groups’:

This will take you to a brand new side of LinkedIn that you may have never visited before. If it is he first time you are visiting groups, you may see a message like this:

Or if you don’t see this message, on the top of your browser click ‘Discover’:

This will now take you to a page where you can join any groups that LinkedIn recommends for you. Remember, you are not necessarily looking for groups that would interest you personally, you are looking for groups with potential customers.

If you see a group that is relevant, just click ‘Join’:

All LinkedIn groups are closed and managed by a moderator and so you will not always be accepted into every group you ask to join.

One of the problems with this technique is that you will only see the groups that LinkedIn recommends for you and not the groups you want to search for, which leads us to the second way of finding groups…

Go back to LinkedIn.com and leave the groups section so the browser looks like this:

In the search bar type the group that you are looking for, e.g. Startup London and press ‘Enter’ on your keyboard.

This will bring a list of people linked to that search term. However, at the moment we are looking for groups rather than people, so click the ‘Groups' button:

This will give you a list of all groups that are relevant from your search term.

Quick Tip:

When looking at which groups to join, try and find groups with fewer than 5000 members. Groups of this size usually have more suitable people. Sometimes when groups have 20,000+ it means that the admin has not been strict on who joins the group meaning that many people may not be in the right industry that you want to target.

Once you have found a group that is relevant to you, click on the group name and you will be taken to the group page as shown below:

Before you ask to join the group, have a quick glance to see if any of your connections are in the group and if they seem like the right sort of people that would be interested in your products or services:

If everything seems positive, click ‘Ask to join’ and repeat this process for 10–15 groups. You are steps away from being part of several groups with a lot of potential customers all in one space.

Quick note here: you can only have 10 pending groups at once, so make sure you are accepted to a particular group before joining others.

Step 2: Connecting with people in groups

Once you have asked to join groups, this can take anything from a couple of hours to a couple of days to be approved depending on how active the admins of the group are. Therefore, try to join a number of groups and each morning go to your groups to see which ones you have been accepted into. Use these links to speed up this process:

Groups that you have been accepted in

Groups that are pending

Once you have been accepted into a group, the layout will look slightly different and it will say ‘member’ instead of ‘Join’:

Now you are part of the group — it is time to get to work and put the Dux into action!

On the right hand side of the group, you will see a description of the group and a list of members:

Click on the members, in this instance 4,978 members and you will be taken to a page listing all of the members in the group.

You may have spent months trying to search for the exact criteria of people to connect with, and now you have a list of 5000 people that would be perfect for you.

If you have been accepted to multiple groups, then you can imagine the potential for how many relevant people there could be to connect with in every group.

To achieve this, you can easily turn on "Expert Mode" in the Dux-Soup Options menu under the User tab.

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You can simply connect with every single person from this group. Just click on Dux-Soup Options, then ‘Visit & Connect’ and the robot will get to work:

Imagine the potential! Visiting profiles will be a great way to present yourself to the group members and also connect with the people who have similar interests.

Bonus Tip 1:

Remember to add a Tag with the group name when you are connecting with people. That way you will be able to keep track of what sort of connections and sales are coming from certain groups. You can read more about using Tag feature in our blog post here.

Bonus Tip 2:

If you have a free LinkedIn account, you will often see this message when you have searched for too many profiles in one month:

This means that you cannot search for any new profiles. However, if this happens, just go to your groups that you are part of and you can engage with all people in those groups with no limitations.

By using this technique, you can now search and find a lot of new profiles to visit and connect with. One point to note is that the relevance of the group members can sometimes vary. This means that you should spend some time analysing the group and its members and only then start visiting their profiles and sending connection request messages. A simple way to do this is scanning all the profiles first, downloading them and removing any profiles that you think are not suitable. Once you have a database of perfect contacts, use Dux-Soup re-visit function to connect with all these people.

Good luck with finding the right groups for you and get in touch at info@dux-soup.com if you have any questions :)

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