LinkedIn Groups: Are They Still Worth Joining?

LinkedIn Groups have been around for over a decade, but if you have been on the platform recently, you have probably noticed they feel quieter than they used to. The short answer: most LinkedIn groups are not worth your time in 2025. Large, general groups tend to be overrun with self-promotion and low-quality posts. But small, well-moderated, niche groups can still be useful for networking and staying current in a specific field.

Here is an honest breakdown of what groups are good for today, where they fall short, and what to do instead if your real goal is growing your presence on LinkedIn.

Key takeaways

• Most large LinkedIn groups are inactive or dominated by self-promotion, making them a poor use of time.
• Small, niche groups with active moderation can still provide genuine networking value and industry insight.
• Group posts do not appear in your main LinkedIn feed, which means they do almost nothing for your post reach or visibility.
• If your goal is early engagement on your own posts, a crew of real people who show up in the first hour is far more effective than any group.
• LinkedIn itself has quietly deprioritized groups over the years, investing more in the main feed, newsletters, and events.

What is a LinkedIn group?

A LinkedIn group is a space on the platform where professionals with shared interests can post, ask questions, share articles, and discuss topics. According to LinkedIn's own help pages, groups are "dedicated spaces for professionals in similar industries or with shared interests to network, share insights, and discuss topics."

There are three types:

Type	Who can see it	Who can join
Public	Anyone, including search engines	Anyone
Private listed	Visible in LinkedIn search, but posts are members-only	Requires approval
Private unlisted	Hidden from search and profiles	Invitation or direct link only

One important detail: once you create a group, you cannot change its privacy setting. Choose carefully.

You can join up to 100 groups at a time and create up to 5 per day.

How to find and join a LinkedIn group

1. Type a keyword or topic into the search bar at the top of LinkedIn.
2. Filter results by Groups.
3. Browse the results and click Request to join on any group that looks relevant.

Some groups let you in immediately. Others require admin approval, which can take anywhere from hours to weeks (or never, if the group is abandoned).

For more on using groups strategically, see our guide on LinkedIn groups for networking.

The honest state of LinkedIn groups in 2025

Here is what most people actually experience when they join LinkedIn groups today.

Most large groups are ghost towns

If you join a group with 50,000 or 200,000 members, you will likely find a stream of links, promotions, and job posts with almost no comments or replies. The people who post are broadcasting. The people who joined years ago have long stopped checking in.

This matches what users consistently report. A recent Reddit thread asking "How do you guys use groups on LinkedIn?" found that the consensus is blunt: general groups are mostly inactive or used for self-promotion, though small niche groups can still provide targeted value.

LinkedIn has quietly deprioritized groups

Over the past several years, LinkedIn has invested its product energy elsewhere: the main feed, newsletters, live events, collaborative articles. Groups have not received major feature updates in a long time. Group posts do not surface in the main feed, which means even good content posted inside a group is seen only by the small percentage of members who actively visit.

Compare that to a regular LinkedIn post, which can reach your entire network and beyond if it gets early engagement. The visibility difference is enormous.

Moderation makes or breaks a group

The groups that still work share one trait: an active admin who removes spam, approves members carefully, and sometimes starts discussions. Without moderation, groups decay fast. If you are evaluating whether to join a group, check the most recent posts. If the last ten posts are all self-promotional links with zero comments, move on.

What LinkedIn groups are still good for

Groups are not completely useless. They serve a few specific purposes reasonably well.

Niche industry conversations

If you work in a narrow field (medical device regulatory affairs, indie game development, fractional CFOs), there may be a small group of 500 to 5,000 members where people actually discuss real problems. These groups work because the members have genuine shared context and the size is manageable enough to moderate.

Sourcing and research

Groups let you see who is active and interested in a topic. If you are in sales, recruiting, or market research, group member lists can be a useful starting point for finding relevant people. You can also message fellow group members without being connected, which is a minor but real benefit on LinkedIn's free tier.

Building credibility in a community

If you are consistently helpful in a well-run group, people notice. Answering questions thoughtfully over weeks and months can lead to inbound connections and conversations. This is a slow play, but it works in the right group.

For a broader look at the group-vs-page decision, see LinkedIn Group vs Page: Which Should You Create?

What LinkedIn groups are not good for

Growing your post reach

This is the big one. If your goal is getting more people to see your LinkedIn posts, groups will not help. Group posts stay inside the group. They do not count toward your profile's engagement metrics, they do not show up in the feed, and they do not trigger the algorithmic boost that comes from early reactions and comments on a regular post.

Replacing a real network

Joining 50 groups does not give you a network. A group membership is passive. Nobody in the group knows you exist until you contribute. Real networking on LinkedIn comes from meaningful one-to-one connections and showing up consistently, not from sitting on a membership list.

Getting engagement on your content

Some people cross-post their LinkedIn content into groups hoping for extra likes and comments. This rarely works. Group members are not there to support your content. They are (at best) there to discuss shared topics. And since group engagement does not feed back into your main post metrics, even the likes you get inside a group do not help your visibility.

A better approach: real people who show up for your posts

If what you actually want is genuine engagement on your LinkedIn posts, the most effective thing is not a group of strangers. It is a small circle of real people who care about your work and show up in the first hour after you post.

This is the idea behind Upshot. You form a crew of friends, colleagues, or fellow founders. When you post on LinkedIn, your crew gets an alert. They open the post on LinkedIn and react or comment themselves, by hand. No bots, nothing that acts for you, no fake engagement. Just real people showing up while the post is still fresh, which is when early engagement matters most for LinkedIn's decision to show it to a wider audience.

Unlike a LinkedIn group, a crew is made of people who actually know you and have a reason to support your work. And unlike automation tools that run bots pretending to be you, Upshot never likes, comments or posts for you. People do every action themselves.

How to evaluate a LinkedIn group before joining

If you still want to try groups, here is a quick checklist:

1. Check the posting frequency. Open the group and scroll. Are there posts from this week? If the most recent post is from three months ago, skip it.
2. Read the comments. Posts with zero comments mean nobody is actually engaging. Look for groups where people reply to each other.
3. Look at the member count relative to activity. A 100,000-member group with two posts a week is dead. A 2,000-member group with daily discussion is alive.
4. Check for moderation. Are there group rules posted? Is spam getting removed? A group without active moderation will be mostly junk.
5. Look at who is in it. Are the members people you would actually want to connect with? Check a few profiles.

Should you create a LinkedIn group?

Creating a group is easy. Keeping it alive is hard. If you are thinking about starting one, be honest about whether you have the time to moderate it, the audience to seed it, and a clear enough niche that people would seek it out.

For most people, you are better off building your presence through regular posting, growing your network intentionally, and forming a small crew of supporters who show up consistently.

If you do want to create a group for your business, we cover the tradeoffs in more detail in LinkedIn Groups for Business: Are They Worth Your Time?

The bottom line

LinkedIn groups are not dead, but they are a shadow of what they once were. The platform has moved on, putting its energy into the main feed, and most users have followed. If you find a small, active, well-moderated group in your niche, it can be a useful addition to your LinkedIn activity. But if your goal is building visibility, growing your reach, or getting genuine engagement on your posts, groups are not the answer.

The thing that actually works is having real people who know your work and show up for it when it matters. That is worth more than a hundred group memberships.