How to Invite Members to Join Your LinkedIn Group

2 of 4 in Series: The Essentials of Creating a LinkedIn Group

After you get your confirmation from LinkedIn that your new group has been created, your next step is to invite members to be a part of this group! The way this is handled with LinkedIn is actually a multi-part process.

You have to define a list of pre-approved members of your group, which you will upload to LinkedIn.

You should do this before you send out any Invitations.
You’re allowed to e-mail your prospective members with an Invitation to join your new group.

LinkedIn provides you with a customized link that you can use as your Invitation.
When a new member clicks that link, LinkedIn checks to see whether that member is on your Pre-Approved list.

If so, she automatically becomes a member. If not, you (the group manager) will see a member request in the Manage section of your group entry, which you will have to manually approve so the user can officially join the group. The user’s status will show up as Pending on their My Groups page until you approve her membership request.

The easiest way to build your list of members is to use a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel and create something called a Comma Separated Values file, which is simply a text file of members and their e-mail addresses. You should definitely have your member list in front of you before starting this process.

When you’re ready to build your list of members, just follow these steps:

Open a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel.

Select File→New from the top Excel menu to create a new blank document.
In the first row, create three column headers.

You need columns for First Name, Last Name, and E-mail Address.
Starting in the second row, fill in the members’ names and e-mail addresses.

As you fill in your list, it should begin to look like this:

Use Excel to build your Group member list!
Choose File→Save As.

The Save As window pops up.
Make sure that the Save as Type option is set to CSV (Comma delimited) and click OK when prompted.

Save your document on your computer where it can be easily found when browsing for it from the LinkedIn site.

Don’t forget to save your file as CSV (Comma delimited).
Go to your LinkedIn account and click the Groups.

Your My Groups page displays.
From the My Groups page, click the Manage link underneath the name of your group.

This brings up the Current Members page of your group (as part of your My Groups tab), as shown here. At first, you’re the only current member of this new group.

The Members page is where you manage all the members of your new group.
Click the Invite Members link from the Manage This Group pane on the right.

This brings up the Invite Members page. For right now, you’re interested in the bottom part of the page, where you can upload your newly created list.
Click the Browse button.

Then find the CSV file on your computer.
After you’ve indicated the list of members, click the Upload File button to upload the list of members into your group.

The next page indicates whether the file was uploaded correctly. You should see your member list uploaded correctly, as shown here. Here, you have two options.

If you’re doing this for the first time, just click Upload and Add.

You’re done! Your new members will appear on the Pre-Approved list for this group.

You can always click the Invite Members link and use the form to manually add additional names at any time.

If the e-mail address of a member’s LinkedIn profile is different from the e-mail address you put in the Pre-Approved list, this member won’t be automatically approved when he clicks the link. You have to manually approve him by clicking the Requests to Join link from the Groups page.