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LinkedIn now the social media platform of choice for lawyers and law firms?

November 11, 2011

LinkedIn for lawyersPedram Tabibi (@PedramTabibi), an associate attorney at Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone has a nice piece in Young Island, part of the Long Island Business Journal, on LinkedIn now being the social media platform of choice.

Per an article Tabibi had read in Entrepreneur Magazine on how to generate leads from LinkedIn, LinkedIn was voted as the most important social media platform of choice over Facebook, Twitter and others. This was based on a survey of nearly 3,000 active social network users conducted by ROI Research and sponsored by Performics.

From Tabibi:

When asked how important it is to an individual to having an account on each of those social media platforms, LinkedIn was voted as the platform of choice by 59 percent of those active social networking users. Twitter came in second at 58% followed by YouTube third at 55 percent, followed by Facebook at 53 percent. While the numbers are close among these social media giants, they do speak to some interesting trends. First, even though Facebook may be the website used by social media users more than any other, and certainly an impromptu poll among fellow young Islanders shows that for some, Facebook is an indelible part of their everyday lives, it appears that social media users now recognize the importance of websites such as LinkedIn and Twitter to aspects of their lives including business. One can imagine that with the current state of the economy, individuals would want to utilize any method possible to gain extra business……….[Surveys like this one show that more and more users recognize the importance of social media for business and advertising purposes. …The article mentioned how LinkedIn “is where business gets done” and how executives from Fortune 500 companies are present on the website.

Here’s a visual from Entrepreneur Magazine showing the growth of LinkedIn as compared to social media.

LinkedIn for lawyers

There’s no question in my travels and meeting with law firms and their business development and marketing professionals that lawyers and law firms are turning to LinkedIn to generate business. Through networking as well as using LinkedIn’s features such as groups and answers to enhance one’s word of mouth reputation.

And why not?

  • LinkedIn’s membership now includes more than 100,000,000 members in over 200 countries, and experienced a 63% increase in unique visitors from 2010 to 2011.
  • LinkedIn experienced an 18% spike from 2010 in its level of importance among the social media platforms.
  • LinkedIn is now the second most popular social network website after Facebook, having surpassed MySpace, which still maintains a following.
  • Top level executives use LinkedIn for industry networking (22% of use) and to promote their businesses (20% of use).

Just this morning after tweeting word of Tabibi’s piece, I saw that Larry Scott, Director of Corporate Relationships at FosterQuan, the nation’s second largest immigration law firm, re-tweeted in agreement that LinkedIn was the now the social media of choice.

I followed up with Scott through LinkedIn mentioning that I was really seeing law firms use LinkedIn for business development and asked if he was seeing that at FosterQuan. His answer was yes.

LinkedIn may have served as a distraction to lawyers a year or two ago. No more.

Lawyers looking to network and do business development are going to LinkedIn in mass. It’s the social media platform of choice for lawyers and law firms.

Agree?