Administrators behind the most popular event groups on LinkedIn say low reach and paltry engagement are rendering their communities obsolete.
“I tell people, ‘Go spend your time somewhere else, because the event group is almost dead,”
said Lotfi Senhaji, a freelance marketer in Morocco who helps run Event Pros, a forum with more than 168,000 members.
“You’ll see that engagement is very low,” he said. “This is the same thing for other groups. You’ll see the engagement isn’t there.”
No one argued that online groups are a match for live meetings and experiences, but what was supposed to be a tool for professionals across multiple countries to share resources and tips has now become a tumbleweed-laden landscape.
Individual accounts run by savvy influencers thrive, especially when they post a lot of engaging content multiple times a day. But groups, intended as an antidote to that kind of clout-chasing, have faltered.
Log in to Event Pros and you’ll find a ghost town. The most recent 10 posts as of Thursday afternoon have zero likes or comments. Group owners are laying the blame squarely on LinkedIn’s shoulders.
“Unfortunately, it feels like LinkedIn has given up on groups, or at least made them a little bit hidden,” said Miguel Neves, the editor-in-chief at Skift Meetings who runs the Skift Meetings Event Professionals Community, which counts over half a million members in its roster.
He says the Microsoft-owned company has tinkered with its algorithm in ways that are unfavorable to groups. For one, group posts usually appear as regular feed posts on a user’s homepage, prompting people to question where they’re from and how they got there.
‘Broken for Over a Decade’
The internet is rampant with post-mortems about the usefulness of LinkedIn groups. Most users agree that, once useful for bringing people together, the abandoned communities are now well past their prime.
“LinkedIn Groups have been broken for over a decade,” wrote one user on the LinkedIn subreddit last year. “The feeds for groups are either maniacally policed to the point where you can’t post anything so they’re only a platform for the creator of the group, or they’re massive unmoderated cesspools of scammers and hustlers with zero redeeming value.”
LinkedIn did not respond to multiple requests for comment in time for publishing.
For Senhaji, Event Pros was an inside look into an international business that hadn’t yet taken off in his country. He was involved in B2B marketing and business development, and joined the group after it was already started by Bob McGrath, VP of Marketing and Government Relations at Volt Mobility of Arvada.
“In my country, I was one of the first adopters of LinkedIn in general,” he said. “Most of the guys were doing the basic things, cold calling and sending emails.”
In the early years, Senhaji says a few posts went viral and the group blew up with little effort. He joined Bob as a co-admin, but everything cratered soon after.
“They started to eliminate everything,” he said. “You’re only able to send five personalized invites. You can only view 100 people per day, send 100 invites per week. All of this wasn’t the case in the past.
“It’s not really working. It’s working for the people who pay to play, maybe.”
Beyond LinkedIn
The heyday of LinkedIn groups may be behind us, but other event marketing forums are thriving.
A UK-based Facebook group called The Delegate Wranglers has about 23,000 members who form part of a respectful community with strict rules about who can and can’t post, Neves said.
“I think Facebook, in general, has managed to make group functionality much more flexible and able to support communities better,” he added.
There’s also the Club Ichi channel on Slack, a buzzing private chat available for $33 a month. (Club Ichi, a company that connects B2B marketing professionals, also offers a temporary three-month membership for those actively looking for work.)
But some argue that LinkedIn can still deliver every once in a while.
Jorge Quiroz is a Barcelona-based marketing consultant whose company Mind Technology helps create digital ecosystems for brands. He helps them build websites, launch podcasts, and even design virtual reality worlds to show off their new products.
He joined the Skift group about a year ago, where he met an events professional who’s popular on the platform.
“I actually followed this guy named Julius Solaris,” he explained. “I initially met him through Skift and I had him in mind. Then I got to bump into him at a conference, and now we collaborate together.”
Unbeknownst to him at the time, Solaris is actually the one who started the Skift LinkedIn group. In 2019, Solaris’s EventMB was acquired by Skift, which swiftly rebranded the buzzing community with its own name.
Quiroz and Solaris are now working together on a group to help event managers improve their processes.
“At the end of the day, the blessing of LinkedIn is being able to cut through so much front that you put up on social media,” he says. “The goal here is to connect. LinkedIn is a lot more effective in doing that, at least with people who work B2B and B2C.”
