Legal Internet Marketing Blog
According to its website, “LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 70 million members and growing rapidly. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals.” Viewed by most as an authoritative site for business professionals, lawyers can certainly join LinkedIn. In fact, they SHOULD join LinkedIn, especially if they want to establish themselves as authorities on subject matter pertinent to their law practice. How can this be accomplished? Simple – employ the same type of effective marketing techniques to your LinkedIn profile that you do in order to rank well in Google and other search engine web results. Still confused? Ultimately, it all comes down to optimization, search engine optimization, that is.
Keywords are essential in ranking well on LinkedIn. According to an article featured on computerworld.com, LinkedIn is essentially the same thing as Google, the primary difference being that you have to sometimes pay in order to rank well in Google, whereas LinkedIn is completely free (all you need is an email address). In addition, LinkedIn has the added benefit of being recognized as a self-promotion site for professionals, which means that it is a perfect forum for attorneys to establish themselves as credible sources of law knowledge. Factor in a question and answer section where LinkedIn members can ask for advice and/or guidance on a variety of issues, including a “Law and Legal” section, and attorneys have an opportunity to make themselves stand out in the legal world. Remember, LinkedIn is a public search directory, meaning that profiles and even Q&A topics will show up not only in LinkedIn search results, but outside search engine web results (e.g. Google) as well.
The key to any marketing strategy should be exposure. Getting your message out there, establishing yourself as a person who knows what they’re talking about, and interacting with clients in a more personalized manner than a personal website can allow are all sure fire ways of establishing credibility and ultimately increasing your number of clients. After all, people nowadays rely heavily on self research, most of which is conducted on the Internet. If it comes down to your law firm, which has little to no presence on the Internet, a second law firm that has a fancy website, but little else, or a third law firm that not only has a website, but also has established itself as an authority on law in the social realm, interacting with potential clients and demonstrating its expertise on an array of legal topics, which law firm do you think an Internet user is going to be more inclined to find out more information about?
With an effective marketing plan, which includes a presence on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, you can rest assured that your law firm will be the one that potential clients will gravitate towards on the Internet. According to the article, LinkedIn profiles can be optimized if you simply remember to generate pertinent keywords and learn how to effectively meld those keywords together with your profile. Good luck!