The Lawyer has revealed The Hot 100 for 2024, and here, writes Simon Marshall, are three ways firms and nominees can extend their LinkedIn reach.
Every year, The Lawyer magazine – one of the legal sector’s leading news platforms – celebrates its pick of the 100 hottest legal sector professionals, who are both excellent at what they do and relevant: “the work they are doing is important NOW”, as The Lawyer puts it. This roll call of legal talent is called The Hot 100, and this year’s winners were announced at the end of January.
To be nominated is a great achievement. And yet each year, I see many nominees and their employers fail to maximise on the brand-building opportunities this affords them on LinkedIn. The best way to amplify any good news story – such as being nominated in the Hot 100 – is to use the triple play of media posts, company posts and personal posts.
Below, I show what this looks like in practice, using the example of the announcement of this year’s Hot 100 roll of honour, with an analysis of the stats for each post-type on LinkedIn. You will see that the five most visible Hot 100 nominees all used the triple-play strategy to achieve the widest reach.
Media posts
In addition to launching a dedicated webpage on its website where the winning nominees are named, The Lawyer magazine issued one LinkedIn post for every person it had listed in this year’s Hot 100. It issued all 100 posts within the space of a few hours.
This normally defies best practice (one or two posts a day is usually the way to go), but The Lawyer has got away with it in this instance, due to the following cascade effect:
- The Lawyer tagged the respective individual in each post;
- Given that it’s an award, the people tagged will like the post, comment on it and share it with others; which means that
- Most of the 100 posts travel across LinkedIn despite all being issued on the same day.
At the time of writing, these 100 media posts have drawn 1,964 likes and 316 comments. For those who run company pages for law firms, this shows that it pays to make posts personal and to tag the relevant people, and that it’s also a great idea to post success stories in addition to technical updates, industry news, etc.
Personal posts
As I write this, 69 of the 100 nominees have issued personal posts about their new status, but only two of these were original posts. That is to say, only two out of 100 people have written LinkedIn posts about their nomination without recycling their employer’s post (seven did this) or The Lawyer magazine’s post (59 did this). Yet we know that original content always does far better on LinkedIn, so this really is a missed opportunity.
Company posts
Let us turn to the 54 company page posts which have thus far been issued. Of these, we can see that the stats at least look a little better, with 37 being original posts by the employer. This is likely because they were written by the firm’s comms team, which recognises the brand-building power of original content.
Of the remaining company posts, 16 are reposts of The Lawyer magazine’s post, and only one is a repost of the nominee’s original post – this is a great thing to do as an employer, as it generates more coverage for both your employee and for you. Others should learn from this human-first approach.
The stats
As you can see in the table below, the personal posts considerably outperformed the firm and magazine’s posts, both in totals and averages per post. Note, in particular, the difference in comments per post for personal posts versus the other types.
It’s because all business is personal. Your friends, family, colleagues, ex-colleagues, law schoolmates and more all come out of the woodwork to celebrate your success if you post a personal post.
The breakdown of stats for magazine posts, company page posts and personal posts
The best course of action is, of course, to combine all three elements: personal, employer and media posts to produce the best overall result.
The simple truth of this is reflected in the fact that the five of the most visible Hot 100 nominees all availed themselves of this triple play, as the table below clearly shows.
All of the top five ranked individuals used the triple play
So when crafting or fine-tuning your LinkedIn strategy, please consider the power of the triple play, as it’s the ultimate way to compound the opportunities gifted to you through positive media coverage.
Simon Marshall is the founder of full-service legal marketing agency TBD Marketing. To date, they have advised around half of the top 100 UK law firms.
