By: Molly A. O’Leary, Communications Manager, Flaster/Greenberg PC
On February 19, 2015, the Legal Marketing Association - Philadelphia Chapter hosted an event at Flaster/Greenberg PC entitled “Expert LinkedIn Strategy and Best Practices.” The featured panelists were Sarah-Anne Hughes and Adam Gross, both Senior Relationship Manager with LinkedIn Talent Solutions, and Kyle Poll, Regional Sales Manager: Mid-market & Enterprise at LinkedIn Talent Solutions. The presenters came prepared with a full agenda, which included: an overview of LinkedIn; your personal brand vs. your firm’s brand; how to utilize LinkedIn for your company; and best practices for enhancing your personal brand and networking with your peers.
As we learned, LinkedIn is the largest and fastest growing social media network out there with over 350 million members across the world, 100 million of those profiles being in the U.S. alone. They are growing extremely quickly with over 200,000+ new accounts created daily and are the 6th most trafficked website in the world.
Here are some key takeaways:
Before connecting with people on LinkedIn, make sure you have a polished profile.
- Headshot - you are 7 times more likely to be found on LinkedIn if you have a headshot associated with your profile.
- Contact information - make sure this is up to date.
- Skills & Expertise - list away - the more the merrier!
- URL - customize your LinkedIn URL.
- Summary - you’re human, act it! Use the first person tense and incorporate keywords in your summary. An easy way to do this is to take your standard job description - highlight the words that are an absolute necessity and include them in your summary, or under your past experience in your profile.
How to differentiate yourself on LinkedIn - With over 350 million members (and growing) it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. Adam Gross used the “Where’s Waldo” analogy to articulate this point where he highlighted establishing your personal brand. You want to be accurate, concise and connected and you want to be the exact match that someone is looking for in business.
Adam also used the Michael Jackson example, which really hit home on what information needs to be listed on your profile in order to be found on LinkedIn. Example: “I’m Phil Jackson and I’m looking for a guard. Michael Jordan, very recognizable character and he’s on LinkedIn. I’m utilizing LinkedIn to pipeline my MBA team for a reason I am unaware. Nonetheless, Michael Jordan could be the best guard on the planet and if he doesn’t have ball handling, great shot, dribbling on his LinkedIn profile I’m not going to find him. It will not occur.”
How to use LinkedIn as a research tool - The biggest thing about LinkedIn is you really don’t know who you know. You’re not searching only your connections; you’re searching their connections as well as their connections, their third degree.
How can you build out your firm’s brand on LinkedIn:
- Establish trust. Once you’re putting out information and you know who you your target audience is, you want to engage them and build that trust as you are a company that comes with industry information. People will want to follow that company and will want to receive information on what that company is up to. I trust that the information you’re the user is useful and relevant.
- Build strong communities. Once you start building your content and pushing content out and engaging people more and more on LinkedIn, you’re going to garner more and more followers, because more people will see you as a thought-leader, whether it’s lots of different industries you work across or a niche industry. Whatever it might be you can build a very strong following in that area.
Who's following your company? 79% of the people following your company are interested in working for you. Take a look - your next employee might be just a click away!