LinkedIn Adds Group Stats Feature

Those of you visit LinkedIn groups hoping for some good exchange of technical information and find yourself growing dismayed to find the group you’ve joined is either dormant or loaded with recruiters may be interested to see that the service has just unveiled a new statistics dashboard.

The new dashboard focuses on three areas:

1. Demographics
2. Growth
3. Activity

One of my pet peeves about LinkedIn’s discussion groups is that it’s nearly impossible to determined prior to joining whether the group will hold any value for you.

People generally join LinkedIn for one of three reasons — network/job hunt, share technical information with colleagues or to promote their product.

While each has its place on LinkedIn – the ability to know what type of group you are joining can save you a lot of frustration that can come from constantly joining (and unjoining) groups.

It seems that LinkedIn is trying to provide  a way for potential new group members to review the relevance of a group in order to attract more participation.

Previously there was no real way for a new member to tell if a group was made up of primarily marketing related posts (aka help wanted) or whether it was more of a technical discussion group.

Give this a try by going to any group and click the “Group Statistics” box on the right hand side of the group’s home page.