Practice Pointers
LinkedIn for Lawyers: How to Optimize Your Profile
August 19, 2024
LinkedIn can be a lawyer’s “most valuable piece of virtual real estate,” and so it’s important for attorneys to learn how to leverage their profiles to improve their career or grow their business, said Annette Choti, founder and owner of Law Quill, a full-service digital marketing team for law firms.
On August 1, Choti presented LinkedIn Lab, a Lunch and Learn program at the D.C. Bar on how lawyers can optimize their presence on the popular social media and job recruiting platform. Choti, a former U.S. Department of Labor attorney, held herself out as an example, crediting LinkedIn for steering her toward a more interesting and profitable career path. “What got me from there to here, in front of you, was LinkedIn,” she said.
Choti’s recommendations ranged from the straightforward — properly filling out the various fields on LinkedIn — to the more advanced, such as including a brand color in the background of your profile photo and paying close attention to the headline field summarizing your professional identity and goals.
Choti also provided insight into the importance of LinkedIn connections, which max out at 500 followers although the number shows up as “500+” on one’s profile. Choti urged attendees to make as many connections as possible to reach that threshold, securing the “social proof” that can help their profile grow on the platform.
A newsletter is another way lawyers can optimize their LinkedIn profile, Choti said, with their connections receiving an invitation to subscribe. And when they do, those subscribers will be directed to what Choti called “that coveted space” — their followers’ personal email inbox. “This is beyond powerful,” she said.
Discussion about newsletters continued into the afternoon session covering content creation for social media, though it also touched upon best practices relating to search engine optimization and how to promote website content to social media. Choti offered the following suggestions:
- Website content should include outgoing links to reliable sources.
- Content should contain at least 1,000 words to play into Google’s interest in substantial material.
- Repeat a target keyword in the material.
Choti also proposed using ChatGPT to generate topic ideas and produce outlines for articles. “Your time is better spent [in] other places [than brainstorming],” she said, although she also cautioned against relying too heavily on AI for content that could be unemotional, unoriginal, and potentially inaccurate.
“AI-generated content has the potential to be a powerful tool for law offices,” Choti said, “but it is important to consider the drawbacks and take steps to mitigate them.”
However, when AI is leveraged alongside other productivity tools such as content publication schedulers SmarterQueue and Later, Choti said that much of the labor involved in the production and distribution of content can be automated without sacrificing quality.
The LinkedIn Lab Lunch and Learn was a joint production of the D.C. Bar Law Practice Management Community and the Practice Management Advisory Service.
