At Passle, we've worked alongside the world's top professional services firms to distil why some firms thought leadership programs succeed in positioning their firm as the go-to choice in the market and why most thought leadership programs fail.

Working with big four accountancies, global consulting giants and pre-eminent law firms, we identified four "pillars" that successful thought leadership programs rely on.

1. Author-Centric Publication
2. Clear Governance
3. Create Once-Publish Everywhere Distribution
4. Relevant Feedback

Successful programs execute these four criteria. Programs that struggle do not.

Today, we're going to look at social media performance data around the first pillar, Author Centric Publication, to show the difference between firms that execute the first pillar and those that don't.

The Immediate Impact of an Author-Centric Approach on Social Media

Once you adopt an author-centric approach to thought leadership at your firm, change happens fast.

The animation below shows the results of a 5-week test between two sets of authors from a top New York-based law firm. 

The first group of authors at this firm were empowered to create content, they benefitted from tools and processes designed to make their lives easier. These lawyers engaged and created content, publishing that to the website and then to other channels. 

Authors in this "author-centric" program:

• Participated 80% more actively on LinkedIn than the second group
• Created content, where their colleagues created none
• Received 5x more new followers than the second group across the 5 weeks

The second group of authors did not benefit from processes and tools designed for them. These authors created little to no original content, and, as a result, were far less active on LinkedIn than the first group.

The Long-Term Impact of an Author-Centric Approach

The immediate impact of adopting this approach is a huge increase in the monthly rate of followers. In the world of professional services, where a few of the right connections deliver huge value - that matters a lot.

When you extrapolate those numbers and view the results long-term, the impact of adopting that author-centric approach is undeniable.

LinkedIn followers for authors from the author-centric program grow much faster than the non-author-centric program, within 4 years those authors have over double the number of followers.