[The latest in our ongoing series of quick hits showing how JD Supra generates networking opportunities and media engagement for clients:]
Typically in discussions about the marketing and business development power of shared thought leadership on LinkedIn, most people focus on authors sharing their own (or their firm's) content on the platform, thereby engaging their own professional 
connections with new posts, articles, alerts, and the like.
Engaging your network with new content is a worthy goal indeed (and why we have a tool to enable such sharing seamlessly), but at JD Supra we regularly see another powerful form of engagement and visibility on LinkedIn.
This other sort of sharing delivers your thought leadership beyond the reach of your own network, where one exponential value of content marketing resides (the people who should know you discover you through your written work) - and it happens when your readers value your published expertise enough to want to share it with their own connections online.
JD Supra readers share our clients' content daily, across all major social networks.
Reaching Readers Outside Your Own Network
Obviously, your content reaches people outside your network when individual readers share it. Recent examples:
- A Senior Information Security Policy Specialist at Schwab sharing a King & Spalding update on a new NIST privacy framework;
- A Financial Planner at Edward Jones sharing a McDermott post on an IRS letter ruling and 401(k) benefits for student loans;
- A Government Accounting Specialist at UTC Aerospace Systems sharing Holland & Knight commentary on solar tax credits.
What 'Corporate Audience' Really Means
There is another form of sharing on LinkedIn that has come about as more and more companies, organizations, and other such professional entities with audiences of their 
own have realized the power of engaging their followers with valuable content.
These outlets have the audience - our clients provide the content. And so, we see on LinkedIn not only individuals sharing JD Supra-hosted content, but companies and organizations, too, via the LinkedIn Company page (many of which have hundreds or thousands of followers). For example:
- Musculoskeletal Clinical Regulatory Advisers, LLC, a healthcare consulting and clinical research organization headquartered in Washington, DC, sharing to 500+ followers of their page a healthcare update by law firm Bradley on a newly proposed CMS documentation and E/M coding changes for physicians...
- iFluids Engineering, an Oil & Gas services company, sharing to 2,400+ followers of their page a piece on protecting against cybersecurity risks by Zapproved...
- The Washington State China Relations Council, a private, non-profit business organization dedicated to promoting all manner of relations between Washington State and China, sharing with 500 followers of its page a Dorsey update on the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018...
When you make your work available on a service such as JD Supra (where our readers opt to receive highly specialized insights and commentary in their field of business), you are significantly increasing your chances of focused, targeted spread of your work as those readers share it again, with their own connections and followers.
This is what we mean when we say that our readers have readers of their own. Examples above.
