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.
Your Choice: Blog and/or Video
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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.
Nancy Myrland is a Marketing and Business Development Advisor, specializing in Content, Social & Digital Media. She helps lawyers grow their practices by integrating the most important marketing practices to build their reputations and their relationships, which leads to building their practices.
Highly regarded as a top independent* LinkedIn consultant, Nancy is a highly respected LinkedIn trainer and content marketing specialist. She helps lawyers, law firms, and legal marketers learn and implement content, social, and digital media strategies that cut through the clutter, making them more relevant to their current and potential clients.
She is also a personal branding speaker, trainer, and advisor, helping legal and business professionals understand the importance and the impact of defining and reinforcing their personal brand.
Nancy is also the founder of the hybrid self-study and online course about LinkedIn, LICFL*, which is a course where she personally guides lawyers through the sequential creation of their LinkedIn profile and presence.*
As an early and constant adopter of social and digital media and technology, she also helps firms with blogging, podcasting, video marketing, voice marketing, and livestreaming. Nancy also works with many firms and lawyers on Zoom and virtual presentation training and coaching to be the best they can be when presenting online.
She also helps lead select law firms through their online social media strategy when dealing with high-stakes, visible cases.
Long story short, Nancy spends a lot of time helping lawyers and legal marketers with:
- LinkedIn Profile and Presence
- Podcast Launches and Consulting
- Content Marketing
- Marketing and Business Development Plans
- Personal Branding, and
- Zoom and Virtual Presentation Training and Coaching
*Nancy is not an employee or consultant hired by LinkedIn, although she was named a LinkedIn Top Voice on the platform in 2024! Top Voices is an invitation-only program featuring a global group of experts on LinkedIn covering a range of topics across the professional world, helping members uncover valuable knowledge relevant to them. Top Voices was previously known as the Influencer program prior to October 2022. Top Voices are vetted to ensure that they meet high trust standards, are consistently active on the platform, and share valuable expertise through content that demonstrates their unique, original contributions to a topic.