Five Ways to Leverage LinkedIn for Your Firm

Linkedin is the social platform of choice for professionals looking to do business and to connect. With Linkedin's robust profile options and the recent addition of the Pulse publishing platform, it provides exceptional value as a place to easily showcase your authority or expertise on a given subject.

Below are 5 quick ways to leverage this further, adapted from the RubyLaw Thought Leadership series entry, "Leverage Thought Leadership Content," featuring Josh Johnson, Vice President of Influence & Co.

Also, see the following links for additional background information on social media use within legal. Here is an entry from Bloomberg BNA's Social Media Law & Policy Report, and here is a link to the New York State Bar Association's Social Media Ethics Guidelines.

Thought leadership is the practice of sharing opinions, perspective, and experience around a specific expertise with the goal of educating, inspiring, and driving innovation within one's industry.

This is the work of educating your key audience on important issues, which will serve to strengthen your level of brand awareness and can help create new client opportunities, and which also keeps you top of mind within existing relationships.

1. The top reasons why clients make the decision to work with you include:

  • Your unique and valuable perspective
  • Ongoing advice and consultation
  • Assistance in avoiding land mines
  • Education on new issues

Price is not in the top 4. Linkedin has 332 million users, 107 of which in the US. 40% check it daily.

2. Repurpose content published elsewhere. Invest time in a quality headline and appropriate topics. Include a relevant call to action at the end of the post. Supplement with other visuals. Tag to correct channels. You should spend as much time distributing content as you spent creating it.

3. Good thought leadership content adds value, shares knowledge, is backed up by data, tells stories, keeps the reader as the primary focus, and provides thoughtful and new analysis. Avoid promotional or me focuses, wild facts that aren't backed up, or bait and switch headlines.

4. Leverage Pulse. Long form posts using Pulse are viewable by anyone on LinkedIn (not just your followers) and are indexed by the search engines.

5. Engage your contacts continually via social media just like you would network in person. Rather than "set it and forget it," encourage continued conversation by asking questions, saying thank you, and sharing further content. Your goal should be to get as many people interacting as possible. A great goal is that 10% of viewers are engaging by sharing or commenting.

And a bonus, 6. Tag your posts to inform the LinkedIn spotlighting algorithm. See Linkedin's guide for tagging. Be sure to measure your success by views, engagement, follower growth, profile views, new connections / messages, website traffic, and content downloads/ subscribes.

To hear Josh Johnson describe this and more in detail, check out the RubyLaw Thought Leadership series entry, "Leverage Thought Leadership Content."