LinkedIn’s Groups Experience Is Getting a Complete Overhaul

LinkedIn will introduce a completely overhauled groups experience at the end of the month, fully reintegrating it into its mobile applications and website after scrapping its standalone LinkedIn Groups iOS app Feb. 15. The new experience will begin rolling out worldwide on desktop and mobile at the end of August, and existing groups will automatically be migrated over. LinkedIn groups director of product Mitali Pattnaik said the professional network’s legacy groups product was a standalone experience via the iOS app and a separate website, and that the experience was fully rebuilt with the goal of making groups easier to access and discover from the LinkedIn homepage and feed on desktop and mobile. According to LinkedIn, more than one-half of its 500 million-plus members belong to at least one group. LinkedIn rolled out group notifications earlier this year to test their effectiveness in prompting members to join discussions, and it said that more than 100,000 group invites were accepted every day, adding that it sees notifications as an effective way for members to stay up-to-date with their respective groups. “Quality of conversations is what brings people back,” Pattnaik said, and on that note, the new groups experience makes those conversations richer and more vibrant by enabling members to share rich embedded links, multiple images and native video. Group members can also take advantage of threaded comments, replies to comments and @ mentions for the first time within the groups experience, and they will have the ability to fully edit their posts, replies and comments. Posting to groups can be done directly from LinkedIn’s main composer, and content can be reshared directly from the professional network’s feed. Groups can be searched by geography, industry and other criteria, and Pattnaik said the new experience brings “the full power of profile data” to groups. She added that even in the current groups experience, which is being phased out, “One thing remained constant: People come to LinkedIn groups to find other professionals with the same background and interests.” And Pattnaik shared the three key behaviors of members of LinkedIn groups: Learning: People coming together to share knowledge. Building real relationships: People form relationships on LinkedIn and often take them offline. Advancing: Group members help advance each other’s careers and become known in their respective communities as experts in their domains. Group administrators will also benefit from the new experience, as they will be able to take membership actions directly via LinkedIn’s flagship mobile app, including messaging group members, appointing managers or removing members. This marks the first time that admin functions are included in the main LinkedIn app, as they had been part of the discontinued standalone app. Group admins can also choose to spotlight content that they feel is timely or important, and after members have seen that content, it will be collapsed to make way for fresher fare. Pattnaik said there are a lot of advanced admin features “that we probably need to rethink and that don’t fit into the current product.” She added that content pre-moderation will not be available when the new groups experience debuts, but it will be brought back in the coming months. LinkedIn said of the new groups experience, “Our focus is to help our members connect, share and learn from people who share similar interests and to make it easier to have conversations about these topics. We do not have plans to integrate with third-party project management software, nor is our focus to build a shared digital workspace for project management, etc.”