LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 722 million members worldwide. As a LinkedIn user, you can connect with other professionals in your industry or related fields to grow your network. With hundreds or even thousands of connections, it can be challenging to manage all of those relationships efficiently. That’s where LinkedIn’s grouping feature comes in handy. Grouping allows you to organize your connections into different categories that make sense for your needs. This keeps your broad network manageable and enables you to engage with your contacts in a more targeted way. In this article, we’ll walk through what you need to know about grouping connections on LinkedIn.
What is connection grouping?
LinkedIn’s connection grouping feature allows you to organize your network into different custom buckets or categories. For example, you may want to group connections by company, industry, location, relationship, or any other labels that are helpful to you. Grouping makes your list of connections more segmented and usable. Rather than an endless list of alphabetical names, you can divide connections up in ways that align with how you prefer to network and build relationships.
Some examples of potential connection groups:
- Current colleagues
- Past coworkers
- Industry peers
- Potential clients
- Vendors/partners
- Recruiters
- Geographic regions
The groups you create are completely customizable based on your specific needs and the types of relationships you have. You can get as broad or granular as you want with your groupings.
Why should I group my LinkedIn connections?
Here are some of the benefits of using connection groups on LinkedIn:
- Stay organized: Grouping makes your network feel less overwhelming and more manageable. Rather than an impossibly long list of connections, you can segment people in ways that make sense for you.
- Engage more selectively: You can target content shares and messages to certain groups rather than blasting your entire network.
- Track relationship strength: Move weaker ties or dormant connections into an “Inactive” group to focus on higher-value relationships.
- Manage privacy: Share less sensitive updates with your wider network and more personal content with your inner circle groups.
- Build strategic relationships: Identify gaps in your network and strengthen groups that align with your professional goals.
- Find connections easily: If you need to quickly connect with contacts at a certain company or in a certain industry, your groups make them easy to locate.
In summary, taking the time to thoughtfully organize your LinkedIn connections into relevant groups will keep your network clean, focused, and optimized. You’ll gain more value from LinkedIn by being able to target relationship-building activities and selectively share information.
How do I create connection groups?
Creating new connection groups on LinkedIn is a simple process:
- Go to your LinkedIn homepage and click on “My Network” in the top toolbar.
- On your Connections page, click on the “Manage” dropdown next to “Connections”.
- Select “Create group” from the dropdown menu.
- In the pop-up window, name your group and click “Create” to confirm.
You can create an unlimited number of connection groups to organize your network on LinkedIn.
How do I add connections to a group?
Once you’ve created some groups, you can easily move connections between them:
- Go to your Connections page.
- Check the box next to each connection you want to add to a group.
- Click on the “Manage” dropdown and select “Add to group”.
- Choose the group you want to add the selected connections to.
Repeat this process to move connections between different groups. Make sure to regularly maintain your groups to keep them organized.
Can I use groups to target content shares?
One of the prime benefits of LinkedIn groups is the ability to share content or messages with only certain connections. To do this:
- Create a new post as you normally would.
- Click the drop-down arrow next to “Post to”.
- Select up to 10 connection groups you want to share the post with.
- Make sure “Only share with your groups” is checked.
- Share your post.
This allows you to segment the audience for your posts. For example, sharing career advice with your mentees group rather than your whole network. Use connection groups strategically for targeted engagement.
Things to keep in mind about LinkedIn groups
Here are some additional tips for effectively managing your connection groups:
- Check that your groups align with your current professional priorities and the types of relationships you need to build.
- Periodically review your groups and connections to remove inactive contacts and revise categories as needed.
- Be purposeful about engaging each group. Don’t just mass message everyone.
- Balance broad groups while also creating enough segmentation to filtr your sharing and networking.
- Remember you can add the same connection to multiple groups if they fit in several buckets.
- Utilize group-specific content sharing and messaging to strengthen relationships.
Conclusion
LinkedIn’s connection grouping feature provides a valuable way to organize your professional network for more targeted, effective relationship building. Segmenting your connections allows you to be more strategic and selective with your networking and engagement on LinkedIn. Taking the time to thoughtfully create and maintain custom groups will keep your profile focused and your broad network manageable. Use groups to filter sharing, highlight gaps, strengthen certain relationships, and showcase different aspects of your professional brand to the right audiences.