Groups are a comparatively little known way to dramatically enhance your networking.   

Within your personal network, making contact with 2nd and 3rd degree connections can be time-consuming and slow, unless you have a paying account and have access to InMail.  With groups, the barriers to communicating with anyone are removed.

For example, I have about 261 direct connections and over 5 million people in my complete network.  So, when I update my profile the 261 direct connections are notified of my action, but that's it.  In contrast, with my groups, when I participate in a discussion question or post a news article I can potentially reach many hundreds or thousands of people.  I have seen Blog articles go from 100s of views to 1000s of views overnight using this approach.

I can easily market to a specific target audience: VCs, Start Ups, International Entrepreneurs or others.  You can even create your own group to develop a captive target group.  

You can be a member of up to 50 groups and you should focus on finding groups that are filled with your target contacts, employers and job referral partners. Here's some features of groups you should know about:

1. Find groups using relevant search terms e.g. Atlanta and Insurance should get me some local industry related contacts.
   
2. Find groups via interesting people e.g. if Joe Smith is a key contact, I can look at his groups and then consider joining them.  I have discovered lots of new Groups this way.  Tall CFOs Group..anyone?
   
3. Research your Group and invite interesting contacts to Link because you have the group in common.  This has a high percentage of success, since you have a bond already.
   
4. Post Updates, News, or other messages and all Group members will be notified.  Great way to passively inform people in your desired network.  But...don't spam or blow your credibility with a naked spam - "Give me a JOB, please!"
   

Finding Contacts through Search

There are various ways of searching and new features continue to be added.  You can search by company, by person, for jobs and by answers.   Searching by company is an interesting way to find out new people you don't yet know.

Searching by company allows you to use search terms to focus on an industry.  Once there, you can limit the search with size terms.  So you could search for all law firms in Atlanta with more than 20 partners.  Once you have this list, you can drill down to individuals and start to cross-reference with your existing contacts.

Another interesting concept is to look at "Viewers of this Profile also Viewed..." - found on the right hand bar lower down.  This is a list of contacts that may be similar to the contact you have targeted, or may have similar connections.  Either way it is like taking advantage of ripples in the networking vortex to discover other valuable contacts.

I like to find people on web sites e.g. attendees at conferences, speakers at seminars and then find ways to connect with them.  Unfortunately, Barack Obama is not taking my calls.

Use your imagination to find ways to uncover hidden gems...

But remember, if you don't make the next step and meet in real life then you will have little impact on your ultimate goals...either finding a job or building a business.

In a final article we will discuss the science of LinkedIn Domination. 

David Kirkup is a Partner with B2B CFO^®, and an active networker on LinkedIn.  He writes a weekly Blog on financial issues with a British humor slant.