I had a great time speaking about LinkedIn advanced tips and some of LinkedIn’s new features to the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) New York City Chapter last week. Thanks to all who came and all the great audience questions! Of course I took a #selfie and posted it on social media. Here’s why:
You can raise your profile and potentially bring in business by posting photos to social media from the events you attend and at which you speak. Statistics show that social media posts with images, especially photos, capture the attention of your audience much more than those without images.
Every time you attend a professional event or conference, use your smartphone to take a few photos of the presenters that resonated most with you (extra points if it’s you!), keynote speaker and fellow attendees and post them to LinkedIn and Twitter.
Try to include either the presentation title in the background or the host organization’s banner or logo. Make sure to use the conference hashtag (which you can find in conference materials or on their web site) and a couple of other relevant hashtags related to the specific industry – you can find the top hashtags to use on online tools Hashtagify or Ritetag.
The accompanying text for your post can read like this (but please vary it up according to your own style): “Thank you to the X organization for inviting me to speak on X topic. I greatly enjoyed discussing X topic [go into a bit of detail on what you spoke about]. Thank you to X and X (this is a good place to thank the conference or event’s organizers who invited you to speak and any sponsors). Then include the conference/event’s hashtag and two more hashtags on the topic – note that some events won’t have a hashtag and that’s fine – just make sure to use the @ sign to tag the organization and its sponsors.
Another extra credit marketing task you can do is to write a key takeaways piece from the event. You can do this whether you spoke at the event or simply just attended it. Think of yourself as chief reporter and take notes and actively listen to the speakers. One of the highest-rated client alerts at a past firm of mine was an article a lawyer went on “Five Takeaways from the ABA Antitrust Annual Meeting.” Why? Because there were hot topics at the event and many people in his network didn’t have the opportunity to attend the event but were interested in the content. Why not bring the content to them and in the process become a valuable source of information, which will bolster your brand and keep you top of mind with them?
These are great ways to maximize your time out of the office, stay top of mind with your network, strengthen your personal brand and relationships (make sure you tag others in the photo using the @ sign before each name), promote your professional pursuits and your position as a thought leader.
Try it and let me know what you think!