Ask a firm about its social media reach and someone will pull up the company page: 1,800 followers, a modest but respectable number, growing slowly. That number is being read as “our reach”, and it is wrong by roughly two orders of magnitude.
The firm’s actual reach is standing in the corridor. It is the collective network of its people, and most firms have never done the arithmetic.
The arithmetic
A partner who has been practising for fifteen or twenty years carries a professional network of somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 connections and followers: clients past and present, referrers, former colleagues, industry contacts, the accumulated relationships of a career.
Take a ten-partner firm at the conservative end of that range and the collective catchment runs well past 100,000 people. Against that, the company page’s 2,000 followers, a good portion of whom are staff and job seekers, is not the channel. It is a noticeboard.
And the two audiences are not the same quality, either. The people following a partner chose to follow a person whose judgement they rate. When content moves through the partner network, it arrives with a face and a relationship attached. When it moves through the company page, it arrives as an advertisement, and gets the attention advertisements get.
Every event invitation, every announcement, every piece of thinking the organisation wants seen can either move through a 100,000-person network of warm relationships or sit on a 2,000-follower noticeboard. Most firms, by default, choose the noticeboard.
The audience inside the building
Here is the half of this almost everyone misses: the network only works if the people in it know what is going on, and that starts inside the firm.
Your closest marketing audience is not a prospect. It is your own partners and staff. Every one of them is having conversations all week, with clients, with referrers, at kids’ sport, at industry drinks, and every conversation is a moment where the firm might come up. Whether anything useful happens in that moment depends entirely on what is top of mind.
When your people see the magazine land, see this week’s social content, see that the tax team just published on the new ruling and that the firm is running a briefing next month, they carry the right information into every one of those conversations. The property lawyer mentions the tax piece to a client who needed exactly that. The admin manager tells her sister-in-law the firm does succession work. Someone forwards the event to a former colleague. None of it was a campaign. All of it was distribution.
That is why internal marketing comes first, not as an afterthought. A firm that keeps its own people informed has activated a sales force it was already paying.
Making the network work is the job
Neither half of this happens by accident. Partners do not spontaneously share firm content into their networks, and staff cannot mention things they never saw. The network sits there, enormous and idle, unless something moves through it on a schedule.
That something is the constant stream: every rainmaker publishing consistently, the layers of newsletter, events, stories and magazine built on top, and all of it visible internally as it happens. The stream gives the partners content worth having under their own names, gives the staff a running picture of what the firm is doing, and gives everything the organisation shares a network to move through. Each follower a partner adds widens the catchment permanently.
This is the multiplier that sits across the whole structure we describe in One Baseline, Many Layers. The baseline creates the content, the layers multiply its forms, and the network of your people multiplies its reach, at no cost per impression, forever.
So when the marketing conversation turns to reach, start with the real number. Not the company page. The sum of your people.