Steps on How to Create a Successful LinkedIn Individual Profile
Over the past ten years, LinkedIn® has become the social media platform of choice for professional networking. It provides free, instant ability to connect with clients, potential clients, and colleagues. It is important for attorneys to embrace and understand the potential to more effectively communicate with their clients and potentially gain new ones while adhering to firm wide regulations and standards of conduct that reflect the nature of the firm.
- Upload a photograph: This photo can be a close up of professional firm headshot or a more candid close up photo. Numerous studies reveal that a photo fosters more connections because people can more easily relate a face to a name.
- Include a Professional Headline: Include job title, but take a few minutes to write short summary of what makes you who you are: eg. Partner, X years of litigation experience defending the brands of major corporations across Latin America.
- Contact Information: Your profile needs to have complete contact information including address, work phone number, and email. Make it as easy as possible for your contacts to reach you
- Summary: Quantify your strengths as an attorney and allow your LinkedIn® profile to become an extension of your website biography. List the things about you that will make you stand out against all other IP attorneys in your jurisdiction. Why should a potential client choose you over any other IP attorney
- Experience: List all previous employers. By doing this, you can reestablish connections with old colleagues and potential sources of new business, referral work, or strategic alliances.
- Experience: Link to firm website to establish your connection to firm and drive traffic to the firm’s website.
- Customize your URL link: LinkedIn® assigns long url links to each profile. You can clean it up by clicking on “customize your public profile url” Create a customized url that is as close to your name as possible. Taking out the randomly assigned numbers will allow you to become more searchable. You can embed your customized LinkedIn® url in your email signature along with your other contact information.
- Highlight your language skills: LinkedIn® allows you to create multiple profiles in other languages. Create a profile in every language that you speak. “Edit Profile” – Choose “Create Another Profile” in an alternate language. There is a drop down box that allows you to select the appropriate language
- Expand your connections
- Upload contacts from all your emails (personal and firm)
- Follow up with meetings with invitations to connect on LinkedIn®
- Personalize your invitations to connect. Do not use the automatic text. Instead, use something that establishes your connection to the potential contact: Ex: “I enjoyed speaking with you at INTA and thought it would be a great idea to connect on LinkedIn®.” or “We worked together years ago at XYZ firm. I hope you are well, and I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn®. “