Why your LinkedIn posts aren't working and what to do instead

You say lawyers learn LinkedIn the wrong way. What does that mean?

I mean, we all treat it as a place where you announce when you get a new job, share company press releases or maybe share an article from the Wall Street Journal. Those things can be useful, but rarely are they all that interesting.

The LinkedIn algorithm optimizes for what's interesting. TikTok is the extreme version of this, and LinkedIn is moving in that direction.

This means your follower count no longer matters the way it used to. If you square up a post where you're expressing yourself clearly, aiming at a defined audience and talking about something a lot of people care about, you can get significant reach very quickly—even if you're starting from scratch. 

How did you figure this out? 

Like just about every lawyer, I ignored LinkedIn throughout my time in practice.

When I started showing up on LinkedIn more, I started noticing lawyers looking at my profile, sending me messages, and, from time to time, liking or commenting on a post. This was after I'd left the practice of law—I wasn't talking about law—and I wondered why all these lawyers were paying attention to me when I'd gone off in this other direction. What I realized was that the LinkedIn algorithm didn't have better stuff to show them.

What qualifies as better or more interesting stuff?

So when you have a post idea, the impulse is to communicate that idea as perfectly and succinctly as possible. What I'd encourage anybody to do instead is take that insight and drop it into a story that shows your specific point of view—one with enough detail about where you're at, who you are, and what's going on in your world that the post probably couldn't have been written by anybody else. That's where good things really start to happen.

I'll use the example of a guy who runs a tax dispute resolution firm. He's one of the few lawyers I knew who was having a hard time while posting consistently and genuinely trying to help people, in an attempt to attract clients. Like all of us, he had learned LinkedIn the wrong way. So his posts had a tendency to read like SEO-optimized informational blog posts—focused on the facts, the information. And again, that's fine. It's good that you know what you're talking about. But who wants to read that? Who's that for?

If I have a tax dispute issue down the road, I'll really care about it. But today I don't have that problem. And if I don't have that problem today, I have zero interest in engaging with it. He was trying to get his posts to land with potential clients, but potential clients do not care—and neither does anybody else, because the stuff he was putting out just wasn't interesting.

That's really the mistake: thinking that just sharing the facts of your subject matter area is going to be enough to attract attention.

The fix—and he's made a ton of progress, he's gained real traction as a creator—was that he started telling stories. Stories of cases and situations, experiences while building his own law firm, that show different aspects of his practice and expertise.

So simply posting more isn’t going to cut it. 

We tend to think about posting as if that's the whole game. It's a part of the game. At CONTENDER, we talk about the three P’s: posting, personal branding and positioning. 

The personal branding piece is getting clear on how you want to show up. I use a tool called the Brand Pyramid to clarify this. It’s:

The third P, positioning, is about understanding where you sit in your network and who you're trying to reach—and recognizing that you'll talk to a fellow lawyer differently than you'd talk to a potential client.

When you just focus on posting, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole lot happening under the surface, and if you want to effectively attract and direct attention to make things happen in the real world, posting is a relatively small piece of the puzzle.

What happens in the “real world” when you do this well? What does success look like?

The most readily available information about whether LinkedIn marketing is working is vanity metrics—impressions, reactions, comments. And there's a disconnect between those and the needles that actually matter in your firm. 

At the end of the day, so much of the value of building a magnetic presence on LinkedIn is about becoming somebody who attracts opportunities. And those opportunities can look like a lot of different things—a paralegal who wants to come work at your firm because of your posts, a local organization asking you to come speak, more applicants for your firm's scholarship, a partner at another firm reaching out because they're hiring. 

Part of figuring out what sort of stories to tell is knowing what sort of opportunities you want to attract.