Please join me for the Association of Legal Administrators, New York City Chapter virtual program on April 21 at 12pm ET on how to market your firm and your lawyers

This is a great time to make enhancements to your personal marketing and business development efforts – especially when it comes to your LinkedIn profile.

In today’s digital world, networking online is just as important as cultivating in-person connections, and LinkedIn is the most important social media channel for professionals in any field. LinkedIn enables you to nurture relationships or build your brand more easily and efficiently than ever before.

But here’s the thing – many LinkedIn users think their profile is strong as is or that they know everything there is to know about the platform, when neither is true.

In fact, only about half of all of users have a 100% complete profile, according to LinkedIn (that means thoughtfully filling out every single field and section that LinkedIn prompts you to fill out). The main reason to do this is quite compelling: it enables you to rank higher in LinkedIn’s search results.

As we are in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, online networking has never been more important to stay top of mind and build connections.

There are three essential building blocks of LinkedIn – your profile, your connections and your interaction on the platform. I find that many professionals focus on the first one – creating a strong profile, but they don’t take it to the next level by strategically building their network (meaning sending and accepting connection requests) and maintaining a consistent presence through liking, commenting and sharing posts.

Here are some ways you can fire on all cylinders when it comes to strengthening your LinkedIn presence. Remember that LinkedIn is where business professionals gather, do research and look for information especially now.

In what is a major game changer on LinkedIn, the platform has rolled out its new Events option to all company pages as part of its efforts to assist companies dealing with the impact of COVID-19.

With so many in-person industry events and conferences either canceled or postponed as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, the new LinkedIn Events feature is helpful to find meaningful ways to connect and promote virtual events to your followers, such as meetups, coffee breaks, happy hours, CLE programs or webinars.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the sadness and uncertainty of the current public health crisis, but so many of us have so much for which we should be thankful and grateful.

It’s important to look on the bright side of things and count our blessings in a time when it’s so easy to feel sad and have a loss of control.

I hope this list inspires you to think about the bright moments in your life too.