Everything PR News
Careers

Where PR Professionals Actually Network on LinkedIn Now — The Post-Groups Playbook

EPR Editorial TeamEPR Editorial Team1 min read
Share
best linkedin groups for pr pros finding connections and insights explained

LinkedIn Groups is dead. Officially still on the platform, functionally abandoned. Discovery is broken, moderation collapsed, spam won.

The largest PR groups — Innovative Marketing/PR/Sales/Word-of-Mouth (once 205k members), Public Relations and Communications Professionals (106k), PR Professionals (40k), Sports Marketing and PR Pros (19k), CIPR, PRSA National, PR News Group, MarketingProfs — became ghost towns years ago.

PR professionals still network on LinkedIn. They just do it differently.

Where the PR conversation actually lives on LinkedIn now

  • Creator posts and comment threads. The best PR pros — senior practitioners at 5W, Edelman, Weber Shandwick, and the specialist shops — post regularly. Their comment sections are the modern PR watercooler.
  • LinkedIn Newsletters. A newsletter subscription outperforms a Group membership for signal-to-noise. PR News, PRWeek, and dozens of practitioner-authored newsletters run inside LinkedIn now.
  • Company Pages of the trades. PRSA, CIPR, Ragan, O'Dwyer's, PR Daily — the news lives on their Company Pages, not their Groups.
  • LinkedIn Live and Events. Panel discussions, agency executive briefings, and industry-body events run as LinkedIn Events. Attendees and speakers become the recurring network.
  • Sales Navigator and lead lists. The commercial side of PR networking moved into paid Sales Navigator. Groups were free. Networking that matters costs money now.

What still works from the old playbook

Direct connection requests with a note. Personalized outreach still works. Cold connection requests without a note still get ignored.

Following practitioners you actually want to learn from. The Follow function replaced the Group notification stream.

Publishing on LinkedIn itself. The Publisher/Articles product replaced Group discussions as the way to establish practitioner authority.

LinkedIn cluster

Founder-Led GTM — LinkedIn archive hub · LinkedIn for B2B Social · LinkedIn Thought Leadership: A 2026 Playbook · Becoming a Thought Leader on LinkedIn · 9 Super LinkedIn Influencers

EPR Editorial Team
Written by
EPR Editorial Team

The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.

Other news

See all
The Podcast Citation Index 2026
EPR Editorial Team · 07/15/2026

The Podcast Citation Index 2026

The Everything-PR Podcast Citation Index 2026: which shows ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews actually cite — ranked, with facts, data, and how PR firms work with each.

Chester Burger: The Counselor's Counselor, CBS News Pioneer, PRSA Gold Anvil (1921–2011)
EPR Editorial Team · 07/15/2026

Chester Burger: The Counselor's Counselor, CBS News Pioneer, PRSA Gold Anvil (1921–2011)

Chester Burger (1921-2011) — CBS News pioneer, founder of Chester Burger & Company, and the practitioner known throughout the field as the counselor's counselor. EPR In Memoriam canonical record.

Main Street's New Capital Stack
Alex Shvarts · 07/15/2026

Main Street's New Capital Stack

The community banks that funded American small business for a century are mostly gone. What replaced them isn't one thing — it's a stack, and every SMB owner needs to understand it.

Most brands are invisible inside AI search. Is yours?

EPR publishes the data every week.

Free. Weekly. Unsubscribe anytime.