LinkedIn

posted on April 10, 2020 by Allison Shields

5 Things You’re Missing From Your LinkedIn Profile

I’ve worked with hundreds of lawyers and reviewed who knows how many lawyers’ LinkedIn Profiles, and I can tell you that most of them are missing these 5 elements:

Is your LinkedIn Profile up to the challenge?

Here are the 5 elements:

1. A header image – otherwise known as a cover photo. The header image appears at the top of your LinkedIn Profile. It is a huge missed opportunity for your personal brand. Your cover photo could include your logo or an image that reinforces your brand. You can also include your contact information in your cover photo – although it appears elsewhere on your Profile, it requires people to make an extra click. Putting it front and center makes it easier for people to contact you outside of LinkedIn. You can use a tool like Canva to create a unique cover image for your LinkedIn profile.

2. Any description of your clients. Remember – your LinkedIn Profile is about you but it isn’t for you – it’s for your target audience, whether that be potential clients, referral sources or other professionals. If I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile, will I know who you help and how? Will I be able to tell what kinds of clients I should refer to you? If I am in your target audience, will I be able to identify you as someone who can solve my problems?

3. Your story. LinkedIn may be structured like a resume, but it shouldn’t read like one. Think of your LinkedIn profile as a vehicle for telling your story and the story of your clients. Don’t just list skills and responsibilities – explain what they mean and their impact in the real world.

4. The jurisdictions where you practice. When you use LinkedIn, you are literally interacting with the world – and that means people outside of the jurisdictions where you practice may be seeing your LinkedIn Profile. Make it clear where you are admitted to practice, and in what courts. It may make it easier for people to refer business to you. Not everyone is going to click over to your website or try to find that information elsewhere. You can include these either in your About section or under Experience under your current position.

5. Any required disclaimers. Check your jurisdiction’s ethical rules – if your jurisdiction requires disclaimers to be placed on advertisements, your LinkedIn Profile likely qualifies. You can add one to your About or Experience sections.

How did you do? Does your LinkedIn Profile contain these 5 elements?

I’m Allison Shields, President of Legal Ease Consulting, and you can find more tips on using LinkedIn in the book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, available on Amazon.com, or you can download our 47 LinkedIn tips for lawyers on my website at LawyerMeltdown.com.

47 #LinkedIn Tips for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Networking, Social Networking, Uncategorized Tagged With: LinkedIn, video

posted on February 13, 2020 by Allison Shields

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Setting Goals for LinkedIn Part 2 – An Example

In my last video, I introduced the idea of setting goals for your LinkedIn use. Today I want to give you an example to show you what that might look like.

Let’s say your goal for this year is to expand your practice to represent more small businesses with their legal needs. LinkedIn can help you accomplish that in a number of ways.

You can search for, and join, groups containing small business owners – and then post helpful information within those groups, or answer questions posed in those groups
You can follow people or companies who focus on small businesses and share their posts or articles
You can post information and links to resources that would be helpful to small business owners
You can post links to information or articles on your website that would be useful to small business owners
You can write articles on LinkedIn that contain information helpful to small business owners
You can search for small businesses in your area on LinkedIn and follow the business owners and their businesses on LinkedIn
You can modify your Headline, About and Experience sections to highlight the work you do for small businesses
You can search for and connect with other professionals who work with small businesses to build referral relationships.

Then you can set specific objectives for LinkedIn related to those goals so that you actually make progress. I think this is where the difference is – making it concrete so you actually have a plan.

For example, you might want to use LinkedIn to:

Identify and connect with three potential new referral sources who work with small businesses a month
Write one article related to small business a month
Make one small-business related post a week
Identify and join three small business groups on LinkedIn and post to each of those groups once a month

When you approach LinkedIn with specific goals and related objectives in mind, you might be surprised at the results.

If you want more tips about how to maximize your use of LinkedIn, grab a copy of my book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Guide for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals on Amazon.com. Or check out this free download of LinkedIn tips.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Social Networking, Uncategorized Tagged With: LinkedIn, video

posted on January 13, 2020 by Allison Shields

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Setting Goals for LinkedIn

It’s January, and that means you’re probably thinking about New Year’s resolutions like finally getting organized and goals for the year, like financial targets or numbers of new clients, but have you ever considered setting goals for how you use LinkedIn?

Hi, I’m Allison Shields, President of Legal Ease Consulting and one of the authors of the newly released book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and other Legal Professionals.

By now, you’ve probably heard that if you’re a professional, you really need to have a LinkedIn presence; most clients, potential clients and referral sources expect you to have a LinkedIn Profile. But you may not have heard much about what to do or how to approach LinkedIn beyond that.

In the book, my co-author, Dennis Kennedy and I talk a lot about setting goals or determining a purpose for your use of LinkedIn. Dennis likes to ask the question, “What are you hiring LinkedIn to do for you?” This is a great place to start.

For most lawyers with established practices, we anticipate that the best use of LinkedIn will be to create, manage, and care for your network of referrers and potential referrers of business. But that may not be the case for everyone. Some lawyers may want to use LinkedIn as a platform to establish themselves as an expert in a specific niche. Others may use it as a tool to identify and attract candidates for employment.

If you’re still not sure exactly what you want to use LinkedIn for, think about your overall goals for the year or for your practice. How might LinkedIn help you to accomplish those goals?

In my next video, I’ll give you some specific ideas about how you can do that. But for now, if you want to learn how to use LinkedIn more effectively, you can get a copy of Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Guide for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals on Amazon.com.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Social Networking Tagged With: books, LinkedIn, video

posted on January 13, 2020 by Allison Shields

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How to Read Make LinkedIn Work for You

In my last video, I gave you a little preview of what’s inside our brand-new book, “Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals,” but today I’d like to talk about some different approaches to how you might use this book, since it may be a bit different from what you’re used to.

While we would love it if everyone read the book cover to cover, we know everyone is busy and that approach probably isn’t the most practical for most people.

The first thing I recommend is that you read this book with LinkedIn open in front of you, whether that’s on a laptop or desktop computer or on your mobile device. This is the fastest and easiest way to take action and to get a real-time idea of what we’re talking about when we go through the different elements on LinkedIn. We purposely did not include screenshots in this book because they change so frequently, but it can be helpful to be looking at LinkedIn while you’re reading.

Since this book is a combination of discussion about high-level strategy for your use of LinkedIn and practical, hands-on tips, I’m going to also recommend that you either keep a notes app open on your device or have a piece of paper and a pen handy so that you can make notes about some of the goals you want to accomplish, such as making a list of the kinds of people or businesses you want to connect with on LinkedIn so that you have it to refer to later.

I’ll give you some more tips about how to get the most out of the book in a future video. But if you don’t already have your copy, you can find it on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions, and it makes a great gift for the legal professional – or really, any business person – in your life.

Please leave me a comment to let me know how you liked the book and how you have been using it!

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Social Networking Tagged With: LinkedIn, video

posted on December 11, 2019 by Allison Shields

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Make LinkedIn Work for You: Now Available!

With the holidays approaching, it’s time to think about holiday gifts, and I’ve got a great gift suggestion for you – which also happens to be one of my major accomplishments this year, and that is the release of my new book, with my co-author, Dennis Kennedy – Make LinkedIn Work for You: A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals.

This book was written specifically for people in the legal profession, but we think it is a useful resource for anyone in any kind of business. If you’re not in the legal world, there are small parts of the book that won’t apply to you, but overall, the advice in the book is sound for anyone.

So, let’s dive in and talk about some of what you can expect from the book. In this book, we’ve taken a strategic approach to how you use LinkedIn and how to incorporate it into your “real world” networking, while also giving you practical tips that you can get started with right away. And if you’re brand-new to LinkedIn, we’ll show you how to get started to build up your LinkedIn presence.

If you’ve watched my other videos or seen me speak about LinkedIn, you’ll be familiar with the “three building blocks” approach that Dennis and I take to LinkedIn, and the book talks about all three of them – Profiles, Connections and Participation – in depth. We end each of those sections with answers to frequently asked questions we hear all of the time when speaking about LinkedIn or working with clients. And each of us share our own approaches we’ve taken to using LinkedIn, and the different things we’ve experimented with and the results of those experiments.

But we also talk about some specialty topics, including:

Building your personal brand on LinkedIn
Using LinkedIn to search for a job
How to use LinkedIn to go into a new practice area or when you move to a new location
Using LinkedIn as a student
And, for the lawyers, we cover how the Rules of Professional Conduct might affect how you use LinkedIn.

I hope you’ll consider getting Make LinkedIn Work for You as a holiday gift this season for the lawyer or other professional in your life – or even for yourself! It’s available now on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle formats.

Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals book cover

Have a wonderful holiday season!

Want more info about LinkedIn? Check out all of my LinkedIn videos here:

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Networking, Social Networking Tagged With: books, LinkedIn, video

posted on December 11, 2019 by Allison Shields

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How Much Time Should I Spend on LinkedIn? Participation

This is the third installment in my video series answering the question, “How Much Time Do I Need to Spend on LinkedIn?”

In the first two installments, I talked about spending 15-30 minutes a day, or a couple of hours a week on LinkedIn, and how to spend that time first on getting your Profile into shape, and then on working with your Connections.

Our last building block is Participation.

Feed – Like, Comment and Share

Liking, commenting and sharing are probably the easiest forms of participation. If you jump into your Feed for only a few minutes a couple of times a week and engage with what your connections are posting, you’ll stay more ‘top of mind’ with them.

[Pro tip: By default, your Feed is sorted by “top” posts – if you start by looking at the top posts and engage with them, your comments or shares will likely be seen by more people. Then sort by “most recent” to see what’s newest.]

Posts
I recommend that you post something to your Feed at least weekly.

Don’t forget that what you post doesn’t necessarily need to be brand-new content that you create.
It could be a post to an article you’ve written some time ago, or it could be a link to content created by someone else on the internet.
If you can give your observation or perspective on the article or ask your audience a question about it to engage them, so much the better.
Don’t forget to tag your connections where it is appropriate.
Remember to always provide value.

Groups

Find Groups to join. Start with Groups you already belong to in real life. Think about Groups your target audience belongs to and join those.

Review Group discussions weekly to see what you can engage with, just the same way that you do in your Feed.

Join or create a discussion in Groups. The easiest way to do this is to cross-post what you’re posting already to your Feed in the appropriate Groups. You can now do this easily in the same posting box where you post updates to your Feed – just change the audience in the drop-down box at the top.

Work up to posting weekly in your most important/active Groups.

LinkedIn Publisher (Articles)

Consider writing longer articles on LinkedIn (which usually are more visible than shorter posts). Obviously, this is going to take a little more time, but I like to re-purpose content from somewhere else, or post just the beginning of an article from my website with a link back to my site for the rest of the article. Often your connections will receive notifications about the fact that you’ve posted an article. (You can see how to do this in my LinkedIn post here).*

In as little as a few hours a week, you can gain a lot of traction by posting and participating on LinkedIn.

If you want more information on how I can help you or your law firm use LinkedIn better, please send me an email or invite me to connect with you on LinkedIn.

See my other videos about LinkedIn for lawyers here:

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Networking, Social Networking Tagged With: LinkedIn, video

posted on November 15, 2019 by Allison Shields

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How Much Time Should I Spend on LinkedIn? Connections

Continuing with my video series answering the question, “How much time do I need to spend on LinkedIn,” in this video, I talk about what you should do with your Connections.

The short answer is that lawyers who spend only 15-30 minutes a day or a couple of hours a week can get results on LinkedIn. But how you spend that time is what’s really important.

The last video talked about how to spend that time on the first of the three building blocks of LinkedIn – your Profile. In this video, we’ll tackle the second building block – Connections.

You can gain some huge advantages from LinkedIn by using your Connections wisely even if you don’t do any of the things we talk about in the Participation building block. It’s about building relationships.

First use that time to build out your LinkedIn network and start a conversation with your connections using the ideas from my videos, How to Build Your Network on LinkedIn, LinkedIn: Your Modern-Day Rolodex, and Make Your LinkedIn Connections Work for You.

You want to approach these conversations with an attitude of helping or providing value – and not just the value you provide as a lawyer in your practice area.

I was at a conference for the NYS Bar Association earlier this week and one of the other presenters was talking about the importance of establishing not just a referral network, but a resource network. You want to be the “go-to” person for your clients, colleagues and potential clients, and that means building your resource network so that even if you can’t help someone, you can direct them to someone who can. So you’ll want to think about that when you’re building your network as well.

But the real value of LinkedIn Connections is using them to enhance your real-life networking. In 15 or 20 minutes, you can make a lot of progress on:

Setting up phone calls or coffee dates with your connections.
Inviting LinkedIn connections to attend an event with you.
Reviewing attendance lists for events you are attending to see if any of your LinkedIn connections will be attending so you can make it a point to introduce yourself. You can even send them a note ahead of time so you can plan to meet.
Reviewing your LinkedIn Connections before you travel to see who lives or works in the area of the event and try to meet them.

When you meet a LinkedIn Connection in person, take a photo and post it on LinkedIn, tagging your Connection.

Want to learn more about how to use your LinkedIn connections? Contact me by email or through LinkedIn to set up an initial consultation.

See more LinkedIn videos:

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Networking, Social Networking Tagged With: LinkedIn, video

posted on November 15, 2019 by Allison Shields

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How Much Time Should I Spend on LinkedIn? Profile

A lawyer recently asked me, “How much time do I need to spend on LinkedIn to be effective?”

I get this question a lot from lawyers. I get it – lawyers are busy people, and you want to get the best results you can from your marketing efforts.

Of course, the more time you spend engaging with people on LinkedIn, the better your results will be.

But realistically, if you spend only a couple of hours a week following some of the tips in this series and in my book (with co-author, Dennis Kennedy), Make LinkedIn Work for You, you can get results.

Focus on the three building blocks of LinkedIn – Profile, Connections, and Participation, and spend only 15-30 minutes a day and I guarantee you’ll start to see results.

Let’s start with the first building block, your Profile.

If you’re just starting out, or you haven’t updated your LinkedIn Profile in a while, this is where I would start.

First, make sure your headline accurately describes what you do and who you do it for, and that it contains keywords your target audience might search for. (Watch my other video on headline tips for more info)
Same thing for your About(Summary) and Experience sections. Make them as descriptive and complete as possible (Watch my ** video to see what I mean)
Add relevant Skills, and get rid of any Skills that are not relevant
As lawyers, we have to worry about the rules of professional conduct – include any disclaimers that might be required by the ethics rules in your jurisdiction
Ask colleagues or clients for recommendations

Then you can move on to adding sections such as Honors and Awards and Publications, and adding media to your About and Experience sections.

Once you’ve reached “All-Star” on your Profile, meaning your Profile is complete, you won’t need to spend much time on your Profile, but we recommend reviewing it every 6 months to make updates.

In future videos, I’ll cover how you should spend that 15-30 minutes a day on the next two building blocks on LinkedIn – Connections and Participation.

But for now, if you’re still not sure where to start or just don’t have time to update your LinkedIn profile, shoot me an email at Allison@LegalEaseConsulting.com or send me an invitation to connect on LinkedIn so we can talk about how I can help you.

See more videos about LinkedIn:

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Networking, Social Networking Tagged With: LinkedIn, video

posted on November 6, 2019 by Allison Shields

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LinkedIn Groups: A Targeting Opportunity

Hi, I’m Allison Shields, President of Legal Ease Consulting, and co-author of the upcoming book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, a Practical Handbook for Lawyers and other Legal Professionals.

A recent survey of in-house counsel revealed that although in-house lawyers are using LinkedIn, and consuming content from outside counsel, they feel that lawyers don’t do a great job of targeting their content.

And one of the comments I hear a lot from lawyers about LinkedIn – especially if they are starting out or they have a relatively small network – is that, even with all of the tips and tricks about how to increase the visibility of their posts, they aren’t getting much attention on LinkedIn.

Using LinkedIn Groups can help with both of these issues.

You might remember from one of my previous videos that I recommended joining Groups that contain your target audience so that you can use the Group’s member list to identify new potential connections.

But joining and participating in Groups containing your desired audience– whether that’s potential clients, journalists, or referral sources – is another way to increase your visibility and get your message to those people who need your help the most – even if you aren’t directly connected to them on LinkedIn.

Many LinkedIn Groups have thousands of members, which means that by posting in the Group, you potentially reach many more members than you would with a regular post on LinkedIn. And you can target your content specifically to the members of that Group an establish yourself as an expert. Reviewing Group members’ posts or asking them questions can also reveal what kind of content they are interested in receiving.

Just like in the News Feed, you can like, comment on and share things other Group members post within the Group.

Just as in real life, some Groups on LinkedIn are more useful – and more active – than others. It may take some work to find Groups that are worthwhile for you. But if you keep at it, you are sure to find at least a few groups that can help you reach your audience effectively.

To learn more about how I can help you and your law firm use LinkedIn, send me a LinkedIn invitation or email me to set up a consultation.

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Expand Your Network with LinkedIn Groups

In my last video, I talked about how LinkedIn can help you to easily follow up, stay in touch, and interact with your real-life contacts and clients if you’re connected with them on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is also a great way to expand your network beyond people you already know in real life. Today we’re going to talk about how you can do that using LinkedIn Groups.

Groups can help you find and connect with more people in your target audience – and that’s exactly where you should start.

When joining LinkedIn Groups with the specific goal of expanding your network, think about who your target audience is and what they are interested in.

What groups do they belong to in real life?

What information are they interested in receiving?

Then do a search for LinkedIn Groups on that topic.

Whether your target audience is small business owners in a specific industry (hospitality, insurance, or in-house counsel), or they have a specific interest, like cycling, there are groups on LinkedIn organized specifically for that audience.

You can also look at your best clients, connections and referral sources to see what Groups they belong to on LinkedIn. Chances are those Groups also contain other people that fit within your target audience.

To see what Groups your LinkedIn connections belong to, go to their Profile and scroll down until you see the “interests” section. Click on “see all” – the Groups your connections belong to on LinkedIn will be listed there.

Once you have joined a Group, you’ll be able to see a list of all of the members in that Group. Look for members who are second-level connections – these will be the easiest for you to connect with because you can send them a connection invitation directly. Once you start connecting within the Group, it will become even easier, because more members of the Group will become second-level connections by virtue of mutual connections within the Group.

So, if you’re looking to expand your network, give LinkedIn Groups a try!

To find out how I can help you with your LinkedIn or other social media strategy, please send me a message on LinkedIn or contact me by email.

See more LinkedIn videos:

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Networking, Social Networking Tagged With: LinkedIn, video

posted on October 29, 2019 by Allison Shields

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LinkedIn: Your Modern-Day Rolodex

Hi, I’m Allison Shields, President of Legal Ease Consulting, where I help lawyers with practice management, marketing and business development, including LinkedIn.

Even with all of the technology available today, most lawyers tell me that they get most of their clients through word of mouth referrals. Their best business development efforts are aimed at networking, and their best assets are their contact and client lists – their address books (or what we used to call our Rolodex).

But this is where LinkedIn can be a gold mine. After all, LinkedIn is a professional networking site; it’s the modern-day Rolodex, with two important advantages: it allows you to continue to “touch” those contacts and clients easily without leaving your office, AND it updates itself, so you’ll always be able to stay in touch with your connections, even if they change jobs.

So how are you using this valuable resource?

First, to make LinkedIn work best for you, you’ll need to actually be connected to all of those important contacts and clients on the site.

Although you can manually search on LinkedIn for each of your current contacts by name to send them an invitation, there are easier ways to find your contacts on LinkedIn.

Here are three helpful ways to quickly find people you already know on LinkedIn

First, you can load your email address book into LinkedIn so you can easily find those contacts and clients and send them an invitation. [One word of caution here – make sure you deselect all so that you don’t inadvertently send an invitation to every single contact in your address book – there are likely people in there you don’t want to connect with. Choose from your list those you want to invite to connect with you.]

Second, you can use LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature to help identify people you already know in real life. LinkedIn uses your activity on LinkedIn, your existing LinkedIn connections and items on your Profile to suggest connections – and their suggestions are more accurate the more complete your Profile is.

Finally, you can use company or alumni search to find people you already know. For example, if you know you have several contacts at a client company, it’s easy to find them by doing a search on the company and then looking at its list of employees. The same can be said for alumni. Search for the school on LinkedIn and them click the alumni button to find people who attended during the same years you did.

In my next video, we’ll talk about how to find new connections on LinkedIn and turn them into real-life contacts.

I’m Allison Shields from Legal Ease Consulting. You can find other videos in my LinkedIn series here on my website at LawyerMeltdown.com (or see below).

If you want help with LinkedIn, send me a LinkedIn invitation to set up a consultation.

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Make Your LinkedIn Connections Work for You

Hi, I’m Allison Shields, President of Legal Ease Consulting, where I help lawyers get the most out of LinkedIn. And today, my question for you is, “What are you doing with your LinkedIn connections?”

So many times I talk to lawyers and they tell me they’re sending and accepting invitations to connect on LinkedIn, but they have no real strategy. They’re just collecting connections, but then they don’t know what to do with them.

In one of my previous videos, I talked about taking the approach to posting on LinkedIn as helping or providing value to your LinkedIn connections rather than just posting about yourself. You can take the same approach with your LinkedIn Connections. Think about how you can help or provide value to your LinkedIn connections.

So for example, who do you know, who are you connected to, or who could you connect to that could be helpful to your LinkedIn connections and their business? Then start making introductions. You can do this by sending them both an email. Or, if they are both local, perhaps you might invite them both for coffee or lunch so you can make the introduction in person.

Another way you might provide value for your connections is by suggesting that they join a particular Group on LinkedIn. If you have found a Group that is especially valuable, where the members post interesting or relevant content, invite some of your Connections to join the Group.

You’ll also want to take your converstaions beyond just the initial invitation and acceptance. Send them articles or other information of interest. Ask questions about their business. One great question to ask is how you might be able to help them or who you might know that you could introduce them to.

Ideally, you want to take your best LinkedIn connections and move the relationship from online to offline. Don’t leave those connections just sitting virtually on Linkedin. That may mean a telephone call, video chat, or meeting in person for coffee or lunch, inviting your connection to attend an event, and more. Keep your LinkedIn connections in mind when you are traveling, too. Look up which of your connections live in your destination city and see if you can arrange a meeting. At the very least, your connection might have a great suggestion for places to visit or restaurants to dine at.

How do you add value to your LinkedIn network? Let me know in the comments below.

I’m Allison Shields, President of Legal Ease Consulting. Learn more about how I help lawyers with LinkedIn and other marketing and business development by visiting my services page, or viewing my other LinkedIn videos.

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Which Posts Get the Most Engagement on LinkedIn?

Do you want to increase visibility and engagement with your LinkedIn posts?

Hi, it’s Allison Shields from Legal Ease Consulting where I help lawyers build the practices they want and attract their ideal clients using tools like LinkedIn. In my last couple of videos, I talked about using hashtags and mentioning connections as two ways you can increase visibility and engagement for your LinkedIn posts.

Today, let’s talk about how you can use the format of your posts to encourage engagement.

Text: Believe it or not, experts say that solely text-based posts still get more engagement on LinkedIn than posts that are not text-based. In other words, you can get engagement even without any fancy equipment or searching high and low for an appropriate image. To make your text posts even more engaging, you might consider asking your audience a question in your post, and encouraging your audience to respond by commenting.

Video: The number two type of post on LinkedIn right now is video – video is hot everywhere. Of course, if you’re a Videosocials member, creating video and posting it on LinkedIn is easy. But what if you’re camera shy? (you can still use videosocials’ feature and just pull the audio) You can create a simple video using readily available tools like PowerPoint and then add a voiceover timed to the slides to create a quick and easy video.

Images and PDFS: Posts with images, or posts that contain PDFs, take up more room in the Feed than text-only posts, and for scrollers, these kinds of posts can be attention-getting, but they can also serve as a way to show, rather than simply tell, what you do, who you do it for, and where your expertise lies.

Again, I’m Allison Shields from Legal Ease Consulting, For more LinkedIn video tips, visit my website at LawyerMeltdown.com and look for my forthcoming book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: legal marketing, LinkedIn, video

posted on September 20, 2019 by Allison Shields

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Mention Connections to Get Attention on LinkedIn

In this video in my LinkedIn series, I talk about mentioning or tagging connections as a way to boost visibility and get some additional engagement from your posts.

Hi, I’m Allison Shields from Legal Ease Consulting, Inc., and in today I want to talk about another way to increase engagement with your posts on LinkedIn.

In my last video, I talked about hashtags. Hashtags can help increase visibility and engagement on LinkedIn with users who use hashtags to search for content or who follow hashtags for content that they are interested in on LinkedIn.

But what if your audience doesn’t actively search for content like that on LinkedIn? Or what if you are sharing something on LinkedIn that’s particularly relevant to a specific connection or group of connections? That’s where you can use mentions or tags for connections in your posts on LinkedIn.

To do that, simply type the @ symbol, followed by the person’s name within your post on LinkedIn. Once you start typing, LinkedIn will create suggestions and you can simply click on the correct one.

When you tag or mention a connection in a post, they’ll receive a notification on the desktop and mobile versions if they have those notifications enabled, and they will receive an email from LinkedIn telling them that you mentioned them in the post, and including a link so they can easily navigate to the post. Mentioning or tagging specific connections makes it more likely that they’ll want to check out a post and possibly like, comment on or share it with their network.

There are two ways to use tags or mentions in your LinkedIn posts. The first way is by mentioning the person’s name within the body of a LinkedIn post itself. For example, I might mention my co-author in the body of a post I write on LinkedIn about our upcoming book, saying something like, “My co-author @DennisKennedy and I are pleased to announce the release of our new book, Make LinkedIn Work for You.” In that post, I’m talking specifically about Dennis, and his name is within the content of the post itself.

But you can also tag your connections at the end of a post to draw their attention to the post even if you don’t mention them within the substantive portion of the post itself. For example, when I post this video on LinkedIn, I might tag Dennis so that he sees I’ve posted a video about LinkedIn, hoping that he’ll share the post with his audience, comment on it, etc. since it’s relevant to the work we do together and to our book.

And that’s an important point – when you are tagging or mentioning a connection in a post on LinkedIn, make sure that post is relevant to them. And don’t over-use mentions or tags. Don’t keep mentioning the same connection over and over because you might end up annoying them. And don’t mention 50 different in the same post, because it may dilute the impact of the mention.

The next time you’re creating a post on LinkedIn, consider which of your connections might benefit most from reading that post, and consider tagging or mentioning them.

Again, I’m Allison Shields from Legal Ease Consulting. Look for my other videos on lawyermeltdown.com.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Social Networking Tagged With: legal marketing, LinkedIn, video

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