LinkedIn has created a Promotional tab within the Groups. Recently LinkedIn has redesigned the Groups and eliminated the “News” tab to promote discussions. In eliminating the “News” tab, the default for sharing an article whether it be yours or a trusted and respected member of the social media community, it defaulted into Discussions. Great, now each member of the group that clicks on discussions will see the article you shared. This, as we know, caused concerns with some group administrators and group members were being kicked out for SPAM! Yes, imagine someone thinking a blog article is spam.
LinkedIn Promotional Tab in Groups
LinkedIn Groups are an excellent resource for connecting with other users who share the same interests within the groups. As an active member of the groups, you are expanding your network and creating new opportunities. As the groups are created and monitored by the administrator and not LinkedIn, a solution needed to be created to allow for articles to be shared and posted as for those that do like them and comment this would be very unfortunate if article sharing was limited to status updates. The Promotions tab, does just that and users can share articles, promote their products/services and more market than discuss.
The promotions tab has a drop down for users to “Flag” as a Job or as Inappropriate.
LinkedIn Group Discussions
The discussions are an area for people to discuss topics, trends, etc as it relates to that group. Where it gets a bit confusing is that in the discussions you can ask questions but there is also the question/answer section that is available to all users and not just those in that group; a blog post can stir up a rather nice discussion but some administrators do not want the posts there. Those that post something that users feel is not best served in the discussions can flag it as a promotion, a job or inappropriate.
The promotions tab is a replacement for news in a way. They could have created a tab that said “Blogs” and directed blog articles there. Promotions are sales pitches and yes in a way a blog is a sales pitch but many people get useful and insightful information from blogs. I am not so sure that people would eagerly run and click on a tab, read and comment upon a direct sales pitch. I could be wrong but while the promotions tab does attempt to keep the discussions to discussions (as I guess the conversations about the blog article are not discussions). but there is a minor flaw here. The default for sharing articles is discussions so instead of clicking the LI from share, you have to manually copy the link, go into the group and add it to the promotions. Not so sure that everyone will be doing that.
What do you think? Is this a step in the right direction to have blogs in promotions?
photo credit: Mario Sundar