When creating a digital marketing strategy, it is easy to overlook the power of social media marketing.
The idea of continually updating different channels feels time-consuming and not worth the investment, but this could be a big mistake for your business.
A large percentage of the population uses social media as their primary method of engaging with and contacting businesses, including law firms.
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Why Should Lawyers Use Social Media?
Understandably, with the immense popularity of consumer brands, it can be difficult to see how the legal industry fits into this type of marketing.
However, social media offers an array of benefits, including increased brand awareness, engaging with the target audience, and attracting prospective clients.
Social networking through platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn provides exposure to a larger audience.
Like back-linking, creating a social media network boosts both your visibility and credibility with your target audience. This is why over 95% of law firms in the most recent Attorney at Work Survey said they use social media. This type of marketing works hand in hand with your law firms website and is important to your overall brand awareness.
Benefits Of Social Media For Lawyers
By using the right talent and the right social media marketing tools, your law firm can grow. We concentrate on the social media platforms that are used by your ideal clients.
Target Specific Audiences: Law firms use curated content to target specific audiences. Posts about your specific area of expertise can boost your brand’s consistency and gain clientele. Law firms can use social media to target audiences in a specific geo graphical location, gender, age range or groups of people based on interests and likes.
Engagement With New and Existing Followers: If you have any social media following, you should be engaging with these followers on a regular basis to build brand loyalty and grow your referral network. You can increase your engagement through question-and-answer sessions and provide valuable information to your audience. Replying to comments can also build your brand’s reputation as helpful and reputable.
Improved SEO: There is a correlation between improved social media channels and increased search engine rankings. SEO is an important part of any effective law firm marketing strategy, so you want to do everything you can to boost your SEO and your website’s visibility. Social media sites allow clients to find you through other channels, which can boost your SEO and bring more visitors to your website.
Answer Common Questions: Lawyers have the expertise and authority to answer common questions about legal issues. The number of questions people have is oftentimes too many to answer, and repeat questions are not fun answer over and over. Social media offers the perfect place to post answers to FAQ’s. Posting these FAQ’s will boost your authority in your specialty and help lower the number of times you get asked a specific question.
New Clients: Social media provides the benefit of boosting your brand’s awareness, authority, community engagement, and SEO. All these benefits compound to attract new clients to your legal practice. A well curated social strategy means more clients which means more business for your firm!
Brand Awareness: Social media is one of the most popular forms of connecting online The instant social connection makes it an invaluable tool for branding and marketing your services. By adding social media to your marketing strategy, you can build your firm’s branding and brand awareness. The more users who see your brand, the more likely it is they will have your firm in mind the next time they need legal services.
Law firm social media marketing also puts your practice in front of the right audience. With social media, you can refine your content to target the clients you want for your business. Your firm will be at the forefront of their minds should these potential clients ever need your services. The familiarity and interaction they have with your brand will also boost your firm’s potential for generating more business.
Manage Your Reputation: An overlooked component of social media is its ability to manage your reputation. Reviews are important to your SEO, so being able to directly engage with clients and work through any negative complaints, should they arise, is key to maintaining your authority, reputation, and rank online. It also shows your firm cares about their clients, which builds trust within the community.
Best Social Media Platforms For Attorneys
While there are many social media platforms out there, it is best to focus on the ones where you can connect with your ideal clients.
By Focusing on the right social media channels for your law firm, you will reach more ideal clients and increase your ROI.
Facebook Marketing For Attorneys
Facebook’s userbase is primarily made up of older adults who check their feed daily. About 70% of adult Americans use the service, and 74% of Facebook’s 1.8-billion-person userbase are active on the site every day. This massive pool of users makes Facebook the #1 used social media to date, which makes it a great place for your law firm to gain visibility.
Posts should be tailored toward Facebook’s mature audience. By centering your content around the culture of the platform, you can gain traction with people in the Facebook community. Since Facebook’s demographics skew towards more mature adults, you should focus your efforts toward communicating to them and not a younger audience that is less engaged on the platform.
Facebook allows you to post a variety of media formats, including videos, photos, and text. Unlike other social media platforms, Facebook’s interface lends itself more to longer content, which gives you the freedom to write anything from short business updates to longer, educational pieces.
Some of the best content to write for your firm’s Facebook page includes:
Client Testimonials: Post reviews and quotes taken directly from past clients you have helped and show potential clients how well your practice has been performing. This boosts your authority within the community.
Educational Posts: You are the expert in your field, but how do you demonstrate that to potential clients? Create informational and educational posts about your practice or the law in general, and this will increase your authority in the Facebook community. Potential clients are more likely to trust your expertise and contact you if they can tell you are knowledgeable in your field.
Instagram For Lawyers
Instagram sets itself apart from other social media platforms because it requires you post visual content first and foremost. This include both videos and photos, including the platform’s increasingly popular Stories and Reels. This might seem limiting, but visual content opens a world of different possibilities, allowing you to showcase your law firm in ways your clients might not have seen before.
Benefits of Instagram’s Platforms:
Visual Content: Posting frequently on Instagram can be difficult, especially if you’re unsure what to post about. Law firms can show off their offices, staff, and even offer behind the scenes looks to improve their relationship with clients. Take your time when creating each post. An image is worth 1,000 words, so you’d benefit from picking a photo that draws attention.
Hashtags: are words or phrases that you can attach to the end of your posts. This allows Instagram to sort your post into categories made up of these tags, so that when a user follows a tag, they are shown similar posts, including yours. As an example, if a user taps on the #lawyer at the end of someone else’s post, your post will likely be in the collection of other, similar posts using #lawyer. Using hashtags also limits the people who see your post to the people that would be interested in what your practice does, or what your post is about. This is a great way target a specific demographic on Instagram.
LinkedIn For Attorneys
Unlike other platforms, which center around a broader audience, LinkedIn specializes in business. Companies, their employees, recruiters, and job seekers all use the platform. The audience and culture around this platform are business-centric, so this site is where you should demonstrate your business achievements, expertise, and knowledge.
Benefits of LinkedIn And Potential Content
Fill Out Your Company Page: These profiles show your business information to everyone who visits your page. In order to make a good impression, you want to fill out as much of your firm’s profile as possible. This includes your phone number and your law firm’s address to help users know how they can contact you and where your offices are located. You can also strengthen your brand by adding a short blurb describing your practice, including your specific niche within the legal community.
Generate Respect: LinkedIn is a great place to post content that demonstrates your office’s knowledge and expertise in your area. By centering content around your practice’s area of expertise, you can post specific information that potential clients can use to make an informed decision about contacting your practice.
Your posts should also focus on clear communication. Using too many industry-specific words may confuse users, which is why you want to write toward a general audience. You build trust with the community and seem approachable at the same time.
Twitter For Lawyers
Twitter is an incredibly fast-paced platform. This is due to the limit of characters you can use when posting, which caps off at 280. This gives Twitter a unique set of pros and cons that other platforms don’t have. The platform’s feed constantly updates to show new content to the user, which means your content should be able to grab someone’s attention quickly.
Benefits Of Using Twitter
Hashtags: Like Instagram, Twitter allows you to add hashtags to your post in order to label and boost it in the right categories. Users can click or tap on a hashtag and get a wide array of similar content. This helps users to potentially see your posts.
Where the use of hashtags differs is how frequently they are used. Instagram encourages users to add hashtags on every post they make, but Twitter’s character limit means you have to be more conscious of both your content and the space needed for your hashtags.
Fast Paced: Shorter content length and a constantly refreshing feed make Twitter a fast-paced platform. This means your posts might show up on a user’s page, but you need to grab their attention quickly or their interest will move on. Keeping posts as short as possible goes a long way to keeping your business on top of the feed.
Creating A Social Media Strategy For Attorneys
Social media has gone beyond selfies and memes to become a powerful tool for businesses.
Law firms can make use of social media to attract new clients while working on their firm’s brand authority.
The benefits of using social media are clear, but in order to get the best ROI, you need a plan.
This plan should be unique to you, your legal practice, your practice areas, and your audience.
Step 1: Know The Rules: It is important to know the rules before you begin using social media to promote your law firm. There are certain rules and responsibilities lawyers have on should adhere to with marketing. Each jurisdiction is different, so be sure to research the rules in your area.
Check out the law society and bar rules for compliance responsibilities and ethics regulations. Keep these in mind before you post or share anything. For example, many states prohibit lawyers from using terms like ‘expert’ or ‘specialist’ to describe themselves.
Step 2: Identify Your Firm’s Goals: The second most important factor to consider when creating your plan are your goals. What does your firm hope to gain from using social media? There are many advantages, but it’s likely you have an idea of what you need and the results you are looking for.
Be sure to make realistic and attainable short- and long-term goals for your marketing efforts. Once you have an idea for what to look for, you can use these goals to guide your marketing strategy.
Step 3: Do Your Research: As with any marketing strategy, you want to make sure you do your research. Look to see what other competitors are doing on their profiles and whether their strategy seems to be working for them or not. Is there a type of content that seems to engage followers more than others? Learn what is likely to be a dealbreaker for potential clients. The key is to build up a cache of ideas for you to pull from when it comes to crafting your own social media strategy.
Step 4: Start Small: When you first begin your social media journey, it can be tempting to try out all the platforms available to you. However, you would be doing yourself a disservice. While it can be exciting to dive right in and try out a bunch of social media platforms at once, you can easily overwhelm yourself and accidentally overlook certain details, leading to ethics violations or abandoned social accounts.
Step 5: Consider Your Content: In order to use your social media profile, you have to know what type of content you want to post. This helps you plan out content in advance and give your profile a cohesive look. It allows you to manage your social media profiles more efficiently.
With content marketing, the focus should always be on quality over quantity. Relevant and original graphics play into the visual aspect of social media and stand out over text content. You want content that engages people in the comments section. Consider your target audience and what they might like to see from you.
With impactful content and messaging, your firm will benefit from increased brand awareness and more client leads. Content benefits your SEO, leading to a higher conversion rate of visitors to clients. Using keywords and meaningful content emphasizes what makes your firm unique and qualified to assist your clients, while also boosting your rank on the search engine results page (SERP).
Diversifying the types of social media with a combination of videos, photos, or question-and-answer sessions. This helps keep people engaged and provides insight into the type of content potential clients are looking for.
Step 6: Use A Schedule: In conjunction with Step 5, creating a content schedule is especially helpful. By pre-planning when you’ll release your content, you decrease the stress of coming up with ideas and needing to post in the moment. An added benefit is increased time to review content before posting, which can reduce your risk of accidentally violating any ethics rules or client confidentiality.
Scheduling also allows for consistency in your posting. If a piece of content is scheduled in advance, you do not have to worry about maintaining your social media presence. Social media tools such as Hootsuite can post for you, freeing up your time while engaging with your followers.
Step 7: Monitor Progress: As with any marketing strategy, digital or not, constant monitoring is the key to growth for your legal practice. You should track, measure, and evaluate the results of your social media efforts and campaigns if you want to be the most effective. Failure to track these metrics leads to wasted efforts and misguided budget allocations.
Monitoring your success, or lack thereof, allows you to see what content gets the most engagement and what content perhaps doesn’t work as well. This is important, as you want to maintain your brand authority and awareness.
Hire A Social Media Marketing Agency
Social media has moved beyond a fun pastime. Now, it is a valuable digital marketing tool for law firms.
The best marketing strategy is to set goals, create a roadmap, and stick to it.
Make use of tools that let you easily create and publish content. By being consistent and active on your social media channels, you are more likely to engage your target audience and increase the number of clients your firm receives.
We understand managing a social media presence is tedious work, especially since platforms are constantly changing from one hot topic to the next. Focus on your own business while we handle the regular maintenance ourselves.
Our services include creating content that will boost your SEO. Our writers consistently deliver the type of legal content that users and search engines love. We carefully plan out content to make sure messaging is consistent and relevant to your legal practice and works to establish your authority.
We also create our own content calendar to make sure we post regularly to keep your followers engaged. Our team carefully monitors posts and regularly performs audits to see what social media strategies are working for you and where your social media campaigns may need improvement.
Whether you’re just getting started in law or need help boosting your firm’s business, we are here to guide you. Contact us and learn more about how we can help add social media to your marketing strategy.