So, you’ve got your LinkedIn profile complete.  You may have even signed up for Twitter.  You know you need to continue to build your online presence – it’s impossible to get face time with past, current and prospective clients on a regular basis.  Your time is limited, their time is limited – they may not even live in your city.

So how can you stay in front of these important people?  You’ve connected on LinkedIn, but what’s next?  Content curation is a way to virtually “stay in front of” your contacts by sharing articles, blogs and other important information relevant to their day-to-day industries and the challenges they may face.

What is Content Curation?

As Pam Dyer explains, content curation is “the art of finding, selecting, and sharing the best, most relevant content related to a particular theme or topic.”   Lee Odden describes it as “finding, filtering and adding insight to content online and sharing with social networks.”

For attorneys, content curation involves: 1) Gathering online content (blog posts, articles, videos); 2) written or created by others; 3) relevant to your area of practice; 4) valuable to your target client base; 5) and then commenting on and sharing it with people in your network.

In this post, I am going to discuss WHY content curation is important for attorneys who want to marketing their practices and develop business.  In my next post, I will discuss HOW to get started.

Why Should Attorneys Get Started with Content Curation?

• It takes less time and effort than creating original content.  Curata’s content marketing pyramid illustrates the idea that curating content (e.g. sharing one interesting article a day written by someone else via your LinkedIn profile) takes less effort and can be done more often than developing your own original short form content (e.g. writing a short article for your firm’s blog or monthly newsletter.)  While writing blog posts as part of your content marketing efforts is designed to be less time consuming than the formal style of writing we learned in law school, there is still a learning curve.  Curating content involves even less of a time commitment, which is good for attorneys because time = money.  

• Learn how writing for the web is different than writing for a judge.  By making it a daily habit to read online content relevant to what is happening in your field, you are able to learn more quickly about what makes for consumable web content in case you begin blogging in the future.  
• Clients see you as a “go-to” source for important information in your field.  There is so much information available on the internet today – it’s time consuming to separate the good from the bad.  (See the quote by @mkapor in the image above.) What better way to impressive prospective clients (or stay in front of past clients) than sorting through and sharing information that will help them do their jobs more effectively?   
• Build relationships with thought leaders in your field who are already writing online content.  Once you do begin blogging, you will want people to share what you write.  One way to get the attention of thought leaders in your field is to share their work with your online networks.  In your post, you can share a link to the author’s LinkedIn or Twitter profiles.    
• Sharing a helpful article = Reason to “Check In.”  Want to reconnect with an old client, or a prospective client you have been targeting for some time?  Send a quick email with an article that you know will be helpful to them given their industry or a specific problem you know they are facing or will face in the near future.  (The second half of this article does a great job explaining this concept further.)  Reaching out with helpful information will go over WAY better than emailing “just to check in.”

Ready to Get Started?

Content curation is a great first step for attorneys interested in jumping into content marketing.  Sharing helpful articles via LinkedIn is just one way to use content curation as a way to market yourself.  There are also a number of online tools and apps that make it something you can do in 10 minutes a day. Stay tuned for my next post in which I will discuss how to make it all work for you with a minimal time commitment.