Editor’s note: In 2018, LinkedIn dropped this feature.

A LinkedIn group administrator can send one weekly “announcement” to members. This is not to be confused with a “conversation.” An announcement goes to users’ personal email accounts, as well as showing up on the group page.

A popular use for announcements is to send out links to news stories posted on a website. This how-to will describe the process.

Prepare the links in a document on your desktop and then transfer them to LinkedIn when it’s time.

Send the LinkedIn announcement at a regular time, such as 9 a.m. Monday.

The software is time sensitive down to the minute as far as permitting only one announcement per week, and it is unforgiving. Forgetting to send the announcement on a Monday means skipping a week to send it on Monday again.

Do not create the new announcement in LinkedIn until the time deadline has passed each week. Otherwise, the announcement won’t send.

The announcement has a character limit and will cut off the type if the announcement exceeds it. Shorten the links using bitly.com.

Get the story links from the stories themselves or, if the stories appear as headlines in a list, by using Firefox and right-mousing over each headline and selecting “Copy link location.”

Be careful entering the URL on bitly.com and copying the URL to paste in your announcement list. The bitly.com form field doesn’t delete old material as one might expect, and you can wind up with two URLs in the form field without realizing it, and then the bitly link doesn’t work.

Log in to LinkedIn with your account once you have your list ready.

Click the “Work” link.

Click “Groups.”

Click the correct group.

Look at the last “announcement” sent.

If the time field says “6d,” which means six days, then you still haven’t passed the seven-day time limit for sending a new announcement.

The time will change to “1 week” about one minute after last week’s announcement was sent.

Begin creating a new announcement once the time changes to “1 week.”

1. Click in the LinkedIn conversation box, and click “Send an announcement.”

2. Enter the title of the announcement.

3. Enter the headlines and links from the stories in the text area.

4. Send a test email by clicking the “Send Test Email” button. The test email will go to your own email account associated with LinkedIn. If the “Sent Test Email” button isn’t showing, you did not click “Send an announcement” and you are just creating a conversation on LinkedIn.

5. Click “Post” to send your announcement. It will appear in users’ email (including your own) usually within 10 minutes. If it doesn’t show up, you may not have sent an announcement. Try again. Another email will not go out if you did send an announcement correctly.

6. After you have sent the announcement, click the three dots to the upper right of the announcement now showing on the page and select “Feature” if you want to make it the “Featured” conversation at the top of the LinkedIn group page. Click “Yes” when LinkedIn asks you if you want to replace the old “Featured” conversation if you had something else selected as the featured conversation.