Setting up your LinkedIn profile is easy, right? You just copy and paste everything from your law firm website bio into your LinkedIn profile.

Done, right?

Not so fast.

Your LinkedIn Profile Is Not Your Website Bio

LinkedIn should not be just another placeholder for your website bio. What do I mean by that? Unlike your website bio, which is, except in a few rare cases, a static bio that doesn’t invite interaction and conversation, your LinkedIn profile is more personal.

I’m not saying your website bio isn’t important. Quite the contrary. As my brilliant friends and website designers and developers over at Great Jakes, Robert and Dion Algeri (two of the nicest people you will ever meet), who have studied websites and visitor behavior extensively for a very long time, tell us that lawyers’ bio pages are the most frequented pages on your website.

On LinkedIn, that’s different. The dynamic is different.

LinkedIn Has 2 Parts

LinkedIn is made up of what I describe as your profile and your presence. They are equally important, but I’d like you to pay attention to your profile first. After you have completed that, then I would concentrate on your presence. In my live and online course called LinkedIn Course For Lawyers, I teach you how to work on your presence while building your profile, but let’s talk about your profile here first.

You can have a robust, informative profile on LinkedIn, but if your presence is weak, then your LinkedIn experience is incomplete and will likely be disappointing to you. You need a healthy blend of both, meaning a robust profile and a meaningful presence.

First-Person Because This Is “Social” Media

Let’s dive a tiny bit deeper. Let’s say you have a strong profile on LinkedIn. You’ve written it in first-person because this is “social” media where you are talking to your profile visitors. Unless your firm has chosen a more social path for its website bios, your website bio was written about you and calls for third-person language.

When you interact with other people on LinkedIn, whether that is:

• A comment
• Clicking on a reaction, or
• Sending them a private message

Or, when they:

• Read something you posted
• Read your LinkedIn newsletter or article
• Watch your video, or
• Attend your LinkedIn Live video or audio event

They will often follow you back to your profile to learn more about you. When you have built a robust, approachable profile, you have given them something to learn about you. You’ve let them into your world. You have provided information that will help them learn what they came to learn about you.

What If You’re Social, But Your Profile Is Incomplete?

Let’s look at another scenario. If you interact with other people on LinkedIn, yet you’ve done nothing about your profile to make sure it is as robust as it needs to be in the most important parts that LinkedIn gives us to use, then when they follow you back to your profile and find it is underwhelming and uninformative, what’s going to happen?

They’re probably going to leave because they can’t find what they came for. Like you, most people are too busy to begin digging around to find another link to follow you back to your firm website and bio. They are on LinkedIn for a reason and aren’t likely to leave the site unless you’ve given them a very good reason to do so.

Bottom Line

What I don’t want to see happen is that LinkedIn becomes another place to paste your website bio. I’d like you to build out your profile in first-person with all of the sections LinkedIn gives you. By the way, many of these sections are a bit hidden until you decide you want to add them.

When you blend these two, your profile and your presence, there are three things that can happen.

You can:

• Build your reputation.
• Build your relationships.
• Build your practice.

That’s a pretty compelling combination.

When you are using LinkedIn this way, it is worth your while to spend time on the platform.