(Wine) Group Participation
Mark Norman
Lifetime Wine Lover, mostly retired wine professional. Future Centenarian living a focused life! Experimenting in nutritional farming for the purpose of living a healthy lifestyle, fulfilling a vision and a passion!
More than 8 years ago I created my first wine group..Vintage Wines...it now has almost 5,800 members. Since than I have created over 30 groups...all having wine as the primary topic...all with slightly different focuses. My largest group is the American Wine Community which is approaching 10,000 members...in total there are over 47,000 members collectively.
It was 18 months ago, at the pace people were joining, I fully anticipated that the groups would pass 50,000 by last fall. LinkedIn made some significant changes..the most prominent was the complete cutting back on notifications of group posts and on comments to those posts. The rate of members joining groups fell back to almost nothing.
I really felt that LinkedIn would not survive...many may not know this but this time last year many stock analysts were predicting that LinkedIn would not make it into 2016.
It did and early this summer Microsoft bought them. Little has changed with the new ownership but for some reason LinkedIn members are increasingly joining my groups again.
Thank you one and all!
There is a fair amount of management that needs to happen in the background to maintain each group. Because of this I am often in the groups several times a day. What I can tell you is that even thought many groups have half a dozen or more new posts daily there is little in the way of commenting. Unfortunately LinkedIn still provides no metrics on how many people are reading any individual post (if any at all). Often members who post and don't get comments eventually give up.
I use to post at least one or more articles everyday. Now (for the most part) I only post once a week and that is in the way of an announcement (all that they allow us to do)...and I do usually get comments..from a handful to many which is great...I think that is because LinkedIn sends out an email to notify members of the announcement (which is really just a post).
As an experiment I am only going to post this (not send it out as an announcement)...I will post it in the Pulse section on LinkedIn too...but lets see how many comments it gets...and then next week I'll post it again but do it as an announcement.
Why? Because I know that participation is the key to a strong group...strong groups build strong communications among members...our very fragmented wine industry needs a sense of togetherness and strong communications!
Retired Wine Professional
8 年Hello Mark, I appreciate your posts and words of wisdom, on the world of wine. The wine world is ever evolving.
Founder and CFO of DEB AGUDA HOSPITALITY GROUP-Develop-Expertise- Bottom Line
8 年Mark Norman, your Passion comes thru! Cheers Debra
Lifetime Wine Lover, mostly retired wine professional. Future Centenarian living a focused life! Experimenting in nutritional farming for the purpose of living a healthy lifestyle, fulfilling a vision and a passion!
8 年John...I appreciate your words...in its way it is not hard work....it is my passion so I find it uplifting doing this!
Fernwood Cellars
8 年I appreciate all you have done throughout the years in posting articles and topics of value to those wine industry. I hope that the administrative burden of maintaining multiple social media sites doesn't discourage you from sharing your wealth of knowledge with the rest of us. Keep up the great work.