In today’s digital landscape, lawyers and law firms must leverage the power of their social media channels, LinkedIn specifically, to build authority, connect with their target audience, and drive business growth.
This may not come as a surprise to you, and you probably already have profiles set up for your firm or yourself across the most popular platforms. While having a presence on social platforms is imperative to boost your brand, it’s only the first step, which leads us to the biggest question:
What are you doing with that online presence, and are you using a social media strategy to expand your reach?
That’s what we’re here to discuss today – expanding your reach, specifically on LinkedIn. Among the various other social media tools and platforms, LinkedIn emerges as a potent tool, tailored to the needs of legal professionals when used as more than just a profile. Hubspot found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating real leads from its users’ networks than Facebook and Twitter.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore why LinkedIn is indispensable for lawyers and provide actionable strategies backed by statistics to help you make the most of this platform beyond just having a sharp-looking profile.
LinkedIn, often dubbed the “professional social network,” boasts over 760 million users globally, with approximately 4 out of 5 members driving business decisions in their organizations. In short, this is the platform you utilize for serious business, serious reputation, and serious connections.
For lawyers, this presents a ripe opportunity for meaningful connection, if and when you use it regularly and with a purpose driven by your social media strategy.
Most lawyers and professionals know that LinkedIn is the “more serious” platform for professional engagement free from the trends and fads that fill the other platforms. If you’re still unsure why LinkedIn is the most powerful platform for expanding your professional reach, let’s break down why LinkedIn should be a cornerstone of your digital social media marketing efforts and strategy.
Your Law Firm’s Targeted Audience
According to LinkedIn, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers, and 40 million are in decision-making positions. In short, these are your people, especially if you’re not a jet setter able to traverse the globe to maintain connections with clients, prospects, and professional connections around the globe. When you create social media posts with a strong strategy, they can be just as effective at building relationships and nurturing clients and prospects as in-person meetings.
Actionable Takeaway: LinkedIn allows lawyers and law firms to connect with colleagues other law firms, clients, alumni, and individuals in their practice area to create a well-targeted network. We’ll give you more on how to do that. Keep reading!
Establishing Authority
Did you know that content shared on LinkedIn generates six times the engagement of Twitter (or X, as the kids are calling it these days), demonstrating its authority-building potential? Again, LinkedIn is where your contacts share meaningful professional updates and initiatives. This is THE place to expand your network in meaningful ways, including building your authority as an expert. Nobody is rushing to your Twitter account to check your resume or find mutual connections. That’s LinkedIn’s place.
Actionable Takeaway: LinkedIn is where you flex, where you share your “humble brags” with a community that understands the enormity of what you’re sharing and, more than that, seeks out the expertise and stats of professionals from whom they need support. Share regular, insightful articles, case studies, and legal updates to position yourself as a thought leader, and save the silly memes for X.
Networking Opportunities
If you want to inform your target audience of your lawyer chops and demonstrate how vast your network of clients, colleagues, and connections is… LinkedIn is the spot. For B2B marketing, know that 80% of their social media leads come from LinkedIn, which serves as an overwhelmingly trusted source for B2B buyers to make informed purchasing decisions, highlighting its networking value.
Actionable Takeaway: Engage with legal professionals, potential clients, and legal industry influencers to unlock networking opportunities, even purely digital connection opportunities like a webinar your firm is hosting, or to take a professional poll. We’ll delve into that a bit more later.
Reputation Management
A well-optimized LinkedIn profile ranks high in Google searches, reinforcing your online reputation, in addition to looking more professional and being your very own public brag board. This is where you include and expand upon any and all wonderful news, continuing education, and even just reflections and thoughts that relate to your service. When used with intention, LinkedIn can be your personal PR firm and boost your entire brand.
Actionable Takeaway: Optimize your LinkedIn profile to ensure it appears positively in search engine results. Unsure how to do that? We’ve got you covered – keep reading.
Your LinkedIn profile is your digital identity and the very first thing your connections see. It should reflect your expertise, accomplishments, and uniqueness.
Let’s break down the key components:
Professional Photo
LinkedIn profiles with professional headshots receive 14 times more profile views. Whether you like it or not, lawyers are often books judged by their covers, and appearance matters!
Actionable Takeaway: Choose a high-quality, professional headshot that exudes confidence and approachability. It doesn’t have to be a super-buttoned-up headshot in a studio, and could even be an in-action photo of you presenting. Just make sure it’s sharp and actually looks like you!
Compelling Headline
A compelling headline can increase your profile’s visibility by 40 times and helps your audience move past judging a book by its cover. Focus on developing a headline that incorporates important search keywords, like “trademark lawyer”. An easy way to do this is to describe your role in an “I help” format. For example, “I help corporate entities protect their brand identities online as a trademark lawyer.”
Actionable Takeaway: Craft a headline that goes beyond your job title, emphasizing your unique value proposition.
Detailed Summary
Profiles with complete summaries receive far more connection requests than those with missing or incomplete summaries. Nobody wants to engage with a ghost. A strong summary humanizes you while explaining what you do and how you approach offering services that make your services unique.
Actionable Takeaway: Write a compelling summary that highlights your legal background, areas of specialization, and what sets you apart.
Highlight Experience
LinkedIn profiles with work experience details get far more views and engagement. Again, nobody wants to connect with Casper (not on LinkedIn, anyway), and it’s important to jog the memory of your audience. Remind them in your experience section where they might’ve collaborated with you on business or give them a rundown of where they’ve heard you present.
Actionable Takeaway: Showcase your legal experience with action-oriented language and quantify your accomplishments.
Recommendations
Just like in real life, recommendations and referrals matter. Your mutual connections matter. If you want folks to engage with you and recommend you for anything, you need to hop in and return the favor.
Actionable Takeaway: Seek recommendations from colleagues and clients to enhance your credibility, and start by offering them the same!
Skills & Endorsements
Users with at least five skills listed receive up to 17 times more profile views. C’mon, we know attorneys don’t like to brag, but we know you can come up with more than 5 skill sets to include. Note: You will want to review your State Bar rules before requesting endorsements. Remember, your endorsements should be from those who have actually been your clients or experienced your services.
Actionable Takeaway: Include relevant skills and encourage connections to endorse them for better visibility. Remember, sharing is caring, and your connections will be more inclined to help if you offer to do the same.
Custom URL
Customized LinkedIn URLs are viewed at a much higher rate than those without a custom URL, and they look so much sharper that the random characters the platform assigns to your account when you sign up for LinkedIn.
Actionable Takeaway: Create a custom LinkedIn URL for easier discovery. It’s super easy. We’re actually getting to that how-to now.
Social Media Marketing: Expanding Your Reach on LinkedIn
With a polished profile, it’s time to amplify your presence on LinkedIn in an authentic and meaningful way! Remember, this tool is mighty and powerful, but its performance and reach are wholly dependent on what you put into it.
Connect Strategically
Personalized connection requests are more authentic and engaging, and thus have higher acceptance rates. Users with in-common connections are more likely to accept your request and engage with you if you’ve taken the time to grow your network.
LinkedIn can help you share meaningful and emotional topics with other people in a positive way. Seeing what events or activities your connections engage in can help inform your approach and engagement with them, allowing you an element of participation in the lives of your audience and a chance to promote your service with valuable content without being salesy.
Actionable Takeaway: Be selective in connecting with colleagues, prospective clients, and industry peers, and personalize your connection requests. Don’t just send the generic messaging LinkedIn so kindly provides. Make it personal and targeted. After all, you want meaningful connections, not fluff. Your messaging needs to match.
Engage Consistently
If there’s one piece of advice we, as a digital marketing agency, preach across clients, across industries, across goals: consistency matters. Showing up on LinkedIn every single day in some form or fashion makes all the difference in the world. The algorithms social platforms use, especially LinkedIn, show favoritism and offer preferential treatment to users who consistently get online and engage with other users. There’s honestly no way around that.
If you find yourself short on inspiration, time, or just overwhelmed by the thought of having to show up authentically online each day, we suggest using a tool like Taplio, which leverages AI to help LinkedIn users grow their reach.
Actionable Takeaway: Actively engage by liking, commenting, and sharing relevant content. We encourage our clients to keep lists of new connections with little reminders about their commonalities. Simple tasks such as commenting to congratulate or even just chime in with agreement on your connections’ posts are great ways to engage with others, get more views, and expand your reach as an expert in your industry.
Join LinkedIn Groups
According to LinkedIn, active group participants have higher profile view rates. These are great resources to find connections with mutual interests or the need for your particular service and insight.
Actionable Takeaway: Participate in relevant groups, share your expertise, and nurture meaningful connections. Folks are more inclined to ask candidly about concerns or needs in these groups that you might be able to help.
Publish Articles
Articles published on LinkedIn receive a lot of views – these are the class pets of the coveted algorithm. Plus, you are likely already writing client alerts, and newsletters, and sharing thought leadership in other places. Why not repurpose that content on LinkedIn to expand your network and reach!?
Actionable Takeaway: Use LinkedIn’s publishing platform to share your legal insights and engage your audience. It’s a very easy-to-use, intuitive tool that is set up to drop and drag text and photos for a professional, effortless look. Presenting these client alerts and intel in this way allows the connections you’ve made to share your work for higher engagement and reach than your standard email list.
Provide Legal Tips and Interactive Sessions
By offering your LinkedIn connections useful tips relating to your practice areas, or by conducting interactive discussions that include questions and answers, you are providing real-time value to your followers, which increases the engagement of your audience and makes you appear accessible and eager to help!
Actionable Takeaway: Utilize current events and common misconceptions that relate to your practice. Be a guiding light for your connections to call on in times of need.
Use Case Studies and Success Stories
Remember how we mentioned LinkedIn serving as your own personal brag book? We meant it!
LinkedIn is the perfect platform to show off the professional skills and knowledge you can offer through anonymized case studies or client success stories. It builds confidence in our clients’ future prospects and reminds your network of LinkedIn connections that your service is not only there but impactful.
Actionable Takeaway: Pull testimonials, quotes, and case studies you already use in your business development and social media marketing strategies and practices to include on your LinkedIn. Explain in detail what kind of client you helped and how.
Drive Traffic to Your Website
Your firm is likely already making daily updates to its website, and they likely include a post about said updates on LinkedIn. By sharing that content from your personal profile and including your own note or personal quip attached to your share, you engage followers of your firm and invite outside connections to visit your firm’s website. Consistent communication with your audience increases your following, as well as your website traffic, and it’s kind of silly not to take advantage of your firm’s existing content being shared on LinkedIn.
Actionable Takeaway: Start sharing your firm’s posts on social media accounts, even those not directly related to your practice group. Be sure to callout other users who could benefit from the information you’re sharing. Remember, boosting firm recognition and service is directly beneficial to you and builds relationships.
Using hashtags is a way to hijack existing traffic and reach. By using relevant hashtags, your target audience is more likely to see your content, as it is relative to the content with which they’ve already engaged.
Actionable Takeaway: Incorporate relevant hashtags to boost your content’s discoverability.
Monitor Analytics
LinkedIn Analytics provides data on your content’s reach, engagement, and follower demographics. This is valuable intel that can drive your social media marketing strategy moving forward. Finding out what topics, what types of posts, and beneficial times to post are major indicators for what you should include more of moving forward, and what you should limit in the future.
Actionable Takeaway: Use LinkedIn analytics to refine your content strategy and engagement marketing efforts further.
Through a strong online presence, attorneys can attract new clients, get speaking gigs, and cross-promote their legal services, by highlighting their expertise, understanding client needs, and simply showing up authentically. We feel this type of participation is simple and intuitive, but that’s because we do this all day every day. Helping firms and professionals expand their reach and build authority is second nature for us, but we know it’s not automatic for many busy professionals.
