Has the direction of Linkedin changed from a business-related social networking site to a marketing platform?
Of 20 “Discussions” within one “Sydney professional” group there where four posts that could only be considered Spam, eight were sales promos, one re-directed to a blog and the remainder were re-directs to ‘free’ information on a commercial site. There were in fact zero discussions.
On checking each of the Authors, it was found that the Spammers listed one or no jobs and every discussion promoted the same re-directed link (these were usually about jobs/careers). One of the reasons I had labelled these as Spam was due to the number of supposedly different authors that used the same link and at regular intervals – usually one per day, per group.
The sales promos were either: group members pushing their own product or that of their employer (they usually had “Marketing” in their title.
The remainder of the posts did contain some interesting information but this was very limited.
That said, I am a member of a number of other groups that have not been hijacked to the same extent, in fact one is very much a question and answer group (for MS-Excel) and rarely has promotions on their ‘discussions’ tab rather, promotions are posted on their promotions tab.
But over all, there are a huge amount of sales pitches being conducted via LinkedIn discussions which generates hundreds of unwanted emails being pushed onto the group members.
This is obviously not the fault of LinkedIn itself, instead it is the Group Owner and Group Managers that are allowing this to happen. Your best option once you have joined the group is to send a notice to the Group Managers (Often Managers will not have seen the post), they can then advise the offenders and/or take appropriate action.
Other Groups might as well have been set up as platforms for the Marketeers due the the type and regulatirity of the posts. There is, thankfully one way of remaining in the group and not being bombarded with sales pitches: go into your settings and change the frequency of the digests and emails for each Group to weekly, daily or none.
But if you do find a good Group, make sure you participate in the discussions, or it will degenerate and eventually value adding activity will stop.
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