What a great way to end the year – in addition to being included on JD Supra’s list of top 10 business development articles of 2018, I learned my same article “Build a Stronger Professional Network Today with These LinkedIn To-Do’s” made JD Supra’s list of top marketing articles for the year, taking the number 3 place! I’m honored and thankful that my articles seem to be helpful to some of you. I promise to keep writing in 2019 so please keep reading them!

I was recently asked to provide my top social media tips and priorities for the year as part of the Legal Marketing Association’s 12 Days of Social Media content series (hint: think visually, align social media efforts with business development and lead generation efforts, think about show versus tell in every post you create, promote your firm’s good works using social media to engage with clients, and utilize the power of evergreen content to bolster your editorial calendar). 

LinkedIn has been slowly rolling out enhancements to its company pages over the past month or so to its millions of users all over the world, and one of them is something that many administrators of company LinkedIn pages have been asking for a very long time – drum roll please – the ability to manage company pages from a mobile device.

When I realized late Friday night that I can now manage the company LinkedIn pages for which I am an administrator, I almost jumped for joy on a very crowded Manhattan street.

But then I realized that you can’t really manage the page from your mobile device and to do what you really need to do editing wise, you still need to be at a desktop computer.

This was a huge bummer for me, and I’m sure many other marketers who are constantly on the go and want the ability to post from their phones just like we can for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I continue to be surprised that LinkedIn’s platform doesn’t yet enable users to have the full range of tools that you do on its desktop version when you are THE most powerful and important social media platform for business professionals.

Read on to learn what you can and cannot do from your mobile device.

If it seems like new LinkedIn features are popping up almost every day, it’s because lately they are (too bad LinkedIn doesn’t really announce new enhancements). LinkedIn has launched a new feature providing users with a host of new options for choosing the audience and visibility of each of their posts.

The new “Review Your Post” feature now gives LinkedIn users the option to select a unique audience for each individual post instead of sending it to everyone in their network, which was previously users’ only option. One size fits all is no longer the default on LinkedIn, which is a long overdue enhancement to the platform. You can even now add your post to Twitter at the same time you push out your post on LinkedIn (that is, if your Twitter account is already linked up to your LinkedIn account – which you can easily do in the settings section – and the post is under the Twitter character limit).

Here’s what you need to know about it plus one more cool new enhancement to the platform.

In our busy day-to-day lives, it’s easy to forget to take the time to be thankful for all that we have and all of those who helped us get there, but that is what the Thanksgiving holiday is all about, right? Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, I wanted to reflect on some of the things for which I am most grateful over the past year. I encourage you to do the same – make a list of everything and everyone for which you are most thankful (you can do this for both your personal and professional lives). It can be really inspiring to take a step back and realize all of the wonderful bounty that you have in your life. Here are nine reasons why I’m thankful this year. Happy Thanksgiving!

There are a lot of law firm blogs competing for market share, they are a huge commitment and not all blogs wind up being successful.

So are they worth it? The short answer, yes, IF you can find a niche and a strong team committed to its success.

Blogs are great branding and lead generation tools – they can often lead to speaking engagements as well as new clients (the holy grail of content efforts). As Susan Kostal writes in her latest article for Attorney at Work, “blogging is also a significant equalizer for those in small and midsize firms. With consistency, many authors from less well-known firms compete more than ably against those in national brand-name firms.” 

Use LinkedIn today. Not tomorrow. It is THE most important networking tool for professionals and will help you quickly build and grow relationships, strengthen your brand and stay top of mind with key individuals in your professional network.

Today, networking online is just as important as making in-person connections. And in the professional world, LinkedIn continues to be the most important social media channel for business development.

Don’t forget that your LinkedIn profile is often the first or second Google search result when someone searches for you online. LinkedIn is powerful, period. 

Lately I’ve been exploring concepts related to how to effectively engage with clients, prospects and other key influencers using social media to both strengthen your brand but more importantly, to generate new business.

At the end of the day, every single social media marketing effort should be designed to support your firm’s business development efforts. That being said, not every post can focus on the business of the firm. Sometimes the highest-rated posts are actually the ones where a firm showcases its “softer” side. For example, pro bono and community service activities, as well as the people of the firm engaging together.

I learned something really important at this year’s 2018 LMA Annual Conference: Successful people are not necessarily happy. But happy people are more likely to be successful.

The takeaway? You should really care about incorporating happiness into your life. Here’s why: In addition to being more successful in their careers, happy people are more productive in their jobs, experience better health and therefore live longer lives. They are also kinder, less hostile and more productive, and the list goes on. To me this seems like the most enthusiastic PSA for happiness in the history of PSAs.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend (and speak) at the LMA 2018 Annual Conference, which is THE largest annual meeting of legal marketing and business professionals in the industry.

If your experience was anything like mine, you learned a lot, you made many new valuable connections, you reconnected with industry friends, and you spent a lot of time in the exhibit hall talking to leading service providers about their products and technologies. You likely saw Mario Lopez and quite a few wrestlers in town for Wrestlemania in the common spaces at the Hyatt Regency, and you returned to the office with a ton of information to digest and ideas to implement, which is exciting but also quite overwhelming.