LinkedIn has increased group administrators’ ability to weed out spam by adding a user permission tool. The new tool allows the administrator of the group to establish guidelines for how users are able to post within the group as a whole. In September, LinkedIn added the promotions tab which was to encourage users to avoid posting non discussion items in the discussions and move them over to the promotions tab. The promotions tab seemed to only have encouraged sales pitches and quickly became an under utilized feature as who wants to read sales pitch after sales pitch?
LinkedIn User Permissions
As a group administrator, you establish the guidelines for the group and how you wish to group members to interact with one another. The Discussions tab replaced the News tab to promote user activity and communication within the group amongst members. The News tab was where users would add their blog posts, posts they read and wished to share with other group members, events, comments or any other items group members wished felt were deemed news.
The replacement of the News tab with the Discussion tab was to promote the members to ask questions of the group members to spark a conversation. While this is in duplicate to the question and answer, it is more focused to receive answers from the other group members to increase communication and conversation within the group. Blog posts are a means of discussions and there have been some sensational conversations and discussions over posts however some of the group administrators have been displeased and see this as spam. The new user permissions allows the group administrators to set restrictions on what can be posted in the groups.
1. LinkedIn Group Permissions. The group administrator now determines how freely the group members can post within the group by choosing different levels of permission. This applies to content that is allowed to be posted as a whole and not individual users.
a. Free to post (discussions, promotions, jobs and comments) – no restrictions
b. Free to post promotions, jobs, comments only and submit everything else. Discussions submissions are moderated.
c. Free to post jobs, comments only and submit everything else. Discussions and promotions submissions are moderated.
d. Free to post comments only and submit everything else. Discussions, promotions and job submissions are moderated.
e. Submit everything for approval. Fully restricted.
2. LinkedIn Group Restrictions. Group administrators are able to set restrictions to new members of the groups or to LinkedIn to avoid new member spamming. This is set to a certain amount of days to allow for the new member or LinkedIn user to listen within the group but not interact or engage.
a. Require moderation for new group members. Group administrators set this restriction to a certain amount of days for new members.
b. Require moderation for new people on LinkedIn. Again, the group administrators set this restriction to a certain amount of days.
c. Require moderation for people with few or no connections. This restriction is not lifted after a certain amount of days.
LinkedIn’s New Group Submissions Que
Once the permissions and restrictions have been set for the group, the group administrator will be responsible for reviewing the submissions that have been sent to moderation. LinkedIn has created the new Submissions Que for administrators to review the submissions and determine if and where they get published within the group. The submissions que is located under the groups Manage tab.
Pending Submissions
If the group administrator has set restrictions to the group, users will be able to review their pending submissions by viewing their activity page for the group and clicking on “Pending Submissions.” Users access their activity from the more drop down in the group’s navigation bar or by simply going into the individual groups and clicking on your profile photo.
This may cut down on spam but will increase the administrator’s responsibilities as they review the submissions. This we know can become a bit tedious and sets the stage for administrators to not review many of the submissions should the group be a very active one. I still think that if LinkedIn should either bring back the News tab or add a Blog tab as I know that I am able to find, read and comment upon blogs that were submitted into the groups. It opens the conversation and many of the discussions that I see are started due to a blog.
What do you think will the user permissions help with spam or will it decrease the conversations within groups?
photo credit: Mario Sundar and LinkedIn blog