Insight

New Linkedin Tool Helps Law Firms Turn Their Lawyers into Brand Advocates

November 19, 2019

Legal marketers know these two things to be true about LinkedIn:

  • It can be a powerful platform for helping law firms tell their stories, share insights, and connect with target audiences.
  • It can be extremely difficult to get your lawyers engaging with LinkedIn (and any other social media) on anything like a regular basis.

Thankfully, a new tool called “LinkedIn Pages Employee Notifications” has arrived. This tool allows you to quickly notify your lawyers and staff about a new post on your firm’s page. Note that, like many LinkedIn updates, this feature is being rolled out irregularly and it might not be available yet for your account. If not, keep an eye out because it should be arriving shortly.

Here’s how you use the Employee Notifications tool:

LinkedIn Employees Notification Tool
  1. Post an update on your page (here’s how to do this)
  2. Click More icon on the update.
  3. Select the option to “Notify employees of post”.

It’s as easy as that! Your firm’s lawyers and staff will see that you’ve shared a post through their notification centre. Note that LinkedIn has put a limit on the number of notifications to once per week, so if you publish a lot of content you’ll need to choose your best to share.

Notifications section in LinkedIn
Notifications Section

You can also see information about Employees Notified under the update analytics section of the company page. (The analytics section is also worth delving into for insights into which posts are capturing the attention of your followers).

This Employee Notifications update is great news for a number of reasons. Lawyers will be notified about a posted article or news item as soon as they log in to their personal LinkedIn accounts; they will no longer have to go to the firm’s page to see what’s been posted.

Up until now, there were no perfect solutions for keeping everyone in the loop. Sometimes lawyers would see notifications about firm posts, but not always. You can tag the lawyers mentioned in posts—something that’s still very much worth doing—but you can’t or rather you shouldn’t tag everyone at the firm. You could collect all the firm posts and distribute them through email, but that takes time and these emails are easily ignored by busy lawyers. With this new feature, you can notify everyone as part of your posting process. The only downside is that it doesn’t integrate with third-party software like Hootsuite.

If you’re at a smaller firm, it might be appropriate to notify staff and attorneys about every new firm post. Larger firms, however, can generate and post a lot of content. LinkedIn has limited notifications through this tool to once every seven days—so you’ll need to be strategic about which posts you choose.

Why Employee Engagement Matters on LinkedIn

This might seem like a relatively minor update, but we think it’s going to create big improvements for legal marketing on LinkedIn. For one, this is going to help generate early momentum for posts.

When your firm’s lawyers and staff “like” or share a post, it expands the audience. Let’s say you have 400 people following your firm’s Company Page; if none of your lawyers share a post, that’s the maximum size of your audience (and in reality only a fraction of your followers will see anything you post). But if ten of your lawyers share a post, and they have an average of 400 connections each, then suddenly your potential audience has increased by a factor of ten. All of that without spending a dollar on LinkedIn advertising (although that still has it’s strategic uses).

LinkedIn’s research shows the outsized benefits of employees sharing content: “Despite the fact that only 3% of employees share content, they generate 30% of all content engagement for a typical business.” Imagine if you had 50% of your lawyers regularly sharing content or 100%…well, we can dream.

Why do posts shared through personal accounts get so much more attention? One key factor is that they have added credibility. When a post comes from a person, and not just a firm, someone is personally vouching for its quality and veracity.

As marketers, we constantly see the power of social validation at work. It’s why referral networks are so crucial. It’s why we’re always seeking out testimonials and quotes from clients. Branding, and especially branding on social media, is more than your firm’s messaging and posts—it’s a conversation people are having about your firm.

When lawyers regularly share content, they start to play a key role in shaping that conversation. Discussion takes off, comments beget comments, shares beget shares.

Pete Davies, LinkedIn’s senior director of product management, says that this platform’s feed is based around the mantra: “People you know, talking about the things you care about.” Personal connections factor into the algorithm, as do interests.

The Employee Notifications tool will make it easier for lawyers to share content, but it’s still no guarantee that they will. If you really want to get your lawyers engaged, you’ll need to demonstrate how sharing, commenting, and writing will benefit them and their practice. You’ll need to show alignment between the firm-wide goals, practice area goals, and the lawyer’s own goals. You might need to show lawyers a few best practices and handy tricks. The easier you can make it for them, the more likely they are to take time out of their busy day to get involved.

Interested in learning how your law firm can leverage LinkedIn for marketing and business development? Speak with our team today.

Featued Business photo created by pressfoto – www.freepik.com

Lynn Fitzpatrick Foley
Lynn
Fitzpatrick Foley

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Connal McNamara
Connal
McNamara

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