The world is advancing online, and almost all businesses are thriving on social media. Are you making the most of it for your law firm yet? If not, we’ll show you the best way to do so!
We believe all companies should use social media for marketing, regardless of their industry & size. Of course, that includes attorneys and law firms.
You can gain new leads, tons of clients, promote your brand without word-of-mouth referrals. It means your firm can grow faster than ever if you consider using the best social media marketing tool for attorney.
Sounds great, right?
And if you are planning to use social media for lawyers in 2021, you’ll need an awesome social media marketing tool to do so.
It will help you schedule posts, monitor your reviews, maintain ads, and share live reports to track your performance. Does that sound like Practina?
It’s the most intelligent social media marketing tool for attorneys. But there’s more in this blog to check out apart from why Practina is the smartest option to level up your law game in the digital world.
Having an automated tool by your side at your disposal will save your time. You can also view real-time results on your social media performance with ease.
But beware: The market is full of social media marketing apps that claim to rocket fuel your law firm. This makes finding the right one for your business a daunting experience, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
Fear not! Other than using the best social media marketing tool for attorneys, we’ll cover a couple of more points in this blog. You’ll read about everything from the benefits of social media marketing, tips to build a foolproof strategy, major social networks to consider, and more.
But first, what does the best social media marketing app for attorneys look like?
Every business has its preferred criteria for a social media management app. Social media for lawyers is no different. Here’s what you should look for when picking a social media marketing app for your law firm.
- Analytics and reporting. Track your social media growth & engagement with analytics. Look for engagement numbers, network and account comparisons, and daily activity reports.
- Support for multiple social platforms. You’ll want to present your law firm in front of a professional audience. One of the best platforms for this is LinkedIn, especially when targeting corporate clients. You may also target families and the average person who’s more active on other channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Ensure your social media management app has a couple of choices to make things easier.
- Post reviews: You need to stay up-to-date with your Google My Business and Yelp reviews from one place. Customer testimonies can work wonders when posted the right way. It acts as a great way to build your reputation and find ways to improve your services. If the social media marketing tool for attorneys you are considering offers such an option to post reviews, it’s the icing on the cake!
- Post scheduling: Don’t want to schedule your posts and ads on each platform? Everybody wants that, but not all social media tools offer the same! Smart tools like Practina makes sure your social media management gets time-saving and hassle-free.
- Lead center: Does your app let you create custom lead forms and notify you instantly when you receive a new lead? If yes, that’s a great add-on as you can strike while the iron is hot and gain a prospect.
- Smart ads. Smart Ads means creating and running an ad on Google within a few clicks. Just select a location, and the tool will automatically generate ads to connect you with your perfect audience. Wondering who does that? Well, Practina is surely your best bet!
Why You Should Consider Social Media Marketing for Law Firms?
Before we start with the tips to make the best of your marketing strategy, let’s understand the value of social media for law firms. Why should you consider it? Is it worth your time, effort, and money?
Here are a few benefits of social media marketing for attorneys:
1: Boost Brand Awareness
People are active on social media more than ever. According to Sprout Social 2019 Index, 44% of consumers agree to increased personal social media usage. So you can say a solid social presence can do a lot. Spread your message in front of the right audience & boost your brand awareness at the same time.
2: Capture Your Target Audience
People use social media for more than to connect to their friends and families. They consume content and interact with brands, businesses, products, services, and you name it. Use the best social media marketing tool for attorneys to engage your target audience & convert them into prospects. Social media is a great way to share informative and engaging content. So answer their queries, resolve their issues, respond to comments, and interact in any way you can.
3: Attract prospective clients
Social media marketing is a powerful tool for law firms to attract new clients. The American Bar Association reveals up to 35% of lawyers who utilize social media professionally were able to gain new clients.
4: Foster Thought Leadership
Another reason why social media for law firms is effective for attracting prospective clients is the way it helps you promote your expertise. You can share valuable information online to prove your credibility and build trust among your target audience.
5: Optimize SEO
Social signals don’t directly affect ranking. But there is a correlation between improved social signals and better search engine ranking. On top of that, Google continues to bring in dynamic content: social feeds into search results. So having a stable social presence may help you gain more visible space on search results for your firm’s name. It will additionally contribute to overall improved online visibility and more traffic.
How Not to Use Social Media for Lawyers
Knowing the DON’Ts is as important as DOs. Here, you can learn how not to use social media as a lawyer or law firm. Practice a good social media schedule to maximize its benefits and maintain your reputation. Whatever you do, make sure you keep away from:
- Fake data. Always be authentic while communicating your law firm’s brand. You don’t have to force a voice or tone on social that isn’t you as a business or profession. If you aren’t known for humor, don’t portray it.
- Feed the trolls. You may get comments from people who just want to stir up trouble. In the online world, these are trolls. So your best way out is to ignore them. Don’t argue or fight online when you represent something official. Should you need to have a conversation, keep it behind the curtain and interact in a civil manner.
- Not taking the liability. Should you ever post or say something you shouldn’t or involve in controversy, be quick to apologize. Mistakes are human and owning up to them will build trust among your audience that you are responsible.
- Missing out on social platforms. You don’t have to be present on each platform that exists. It’s a surefire way to face burnout. Rather, go for the platforms your ideal clients use. For a rookie using the best social media marketing tool for attorneys, it’s okay to start with one channel. Once you get the hang of things, you can build up over time and move to more social channels.
- Using social media as a billboard. There’s more to social media than promoting yourself & hyping your business. Don’t turn your account into a billboard of promotional content. You should use your platforms to connect, chat, & serve your audience. Answer their queries, alleviate their fears, and prove to them you can help!
- Irregular posts. Social media isn’t a one-post-a-month game. Be consistent to make waves. If you feel overwhelmed with the task, consider the best social media marketing tool for attorneys such as Practina. The automated tool will simplify most tasks and reduce manual errors.
Also Read: Marketing Tips for Lawyers
Tips to Build a Winning Social Media Strategy
So now you know how important social media marketing for lawyers is. The next step is to generate the desired ROI, you need a foolproof plan. Your marketing strategy is unique to your business, your practice areas, and your audience. But these tips will serve as the best practices to get your social media on the right track. Take a look:
1. Know the Rules
Gain knowledge of all the rules and responsibilities lawyers have on social media in your jurisdiction. Do this before you set up an account individually or for your law firm.
You can browse the law society and bar rules for compliance responsibilities and ethics regulations. Make sure you know everything before you post or share anything online. Some states prohibit lawyers from using specific terms like ‘best,’ ‘expert,’ or even ‘specialist’ to describe their business or themselves.
2. Set Your Goals
What are your business goals? What do you expect from social media? Is it more clients? Is it better brand awareness in your legal community? Or all you want is more website visitors?
Set realistic and attainable short-term and long-term goals for your social media campaigns. SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound) will take you a long way when you do it right. Once you know what you need to achieve, you can refer to these goals to guide your social media marketing journey.
3. Do Market Research
You need to check out what your competitors are doing and how they use social media differently. This will help you stay ahead of the game. Figure out what works for them, and what can be a dealbreaker for prospective clients.
One smart way to do so is to follow the legal influencers in your practice area. Share their content, engage in their online communities, and actively respond to questions and threads.
4. Start Small
We know it may feel tempting to jump in and try your hands at all the social media platforms you find. But honestly, you might be doing yourself a disservice.
When you start with multiple social media accounts at once, chances are you’ll get overwhelmed sooner. You won’t be able to dedicate enough time and attention to each of them. This will lead to potential ethics violations or even inactive accounts. So rather than doing your firm more harm than good, try an automated social media post scheduler for help.
5. Plan content
You can’t just post anything on social media, especially as an attorney. Take time to plan what you should post to your social media accounts. You can develop new content for social media marketing, reshare the content of influencers, and share existing content. The ultimate goal is to focus on building engagement in comments. It’s a good idea to consider what your target audience wants to hear or read as you plan your strategy. Make sure your content is a mix of text and images to keep it engaging.
6. Make a Schedule
The best social media marketing tool for attorneys such as Practina lets you create a content calendar as required. Pre-planning content removes the hassle of brainstorming what to post at the moment. Additionally, the intelligent tool creates, schedules, and publishes posts on its own as per your business needs. What else do you need?
If you are doing it manually, always review posts before you publish to reduce the risk of violating any ethics, rules, or client confidentiality by accident.
A pre-set content calendar also helps you maintain a strong social media presence, increase engagement, & connect better with your target audience.
7. Monitor Performance & Results
As with any social media marketing for law firms, it’s crucial to track, measure, and evaluate the performance of your social media strategy. Attorneys or law firms that fail to track favorable metrics risk their efforts, time, and money on the wrong tactics.
How each social network can work for your law firm
With multiple social media channels around, it’s worth to know the basics and refresh yourself on what’s trending. This will help you dedicate and plan time, budget, and focus accordingly on the most favorable choices. Based on the factors such as your target audience, industry, the type of content you want to post, some social networks may be more suitable to you or your firm compared to the rest. LinkedIn and Facebook have a different target audience than YouTube. So you wouldn’t want to share the same content across these.
Facebook has 2.8 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular social media platform on a global level. It’s also popular among legal professionals and that’s exactly why you should consider it in the first place.
You can enjoy exponential reach from Facebook. But be wary as the platform’s algorithms prioritize friends-and-family posts in the News Feed. It implies it’s more challenging for your posts to be visible. Even if it does, it’s on a relatively short timeline. Also, you’re wasting your time if your target audience can’t see your posts.
So what’s the solution?
Well, Practina can create customized posts and ads that will target specific audiences.
Did you know LinkedIn is the most preferred social media channel among attorneys in the US? The ABA’s 2018 Report states law firms use LinkedIn more than any other platform, including Facebook!
But why is LinkedIn so popular for social media marketing for law firms?
The reason is: It’s tailor-made for business!
The platform is designed to market your professional persona and build connections with others in the legal industry. This will come in handy to gain referrals.
It’s critical to ensure your business profile on LinkedIn is a clear reflection of you and your law firm.
Need some tips for a convincing LinkedIn profile?
- Be professional. Always keep your profile picture professional.
- Engage. Plan content & write a clear headline, crisp summary, and sensible descriptions of your law firm experience, history, achievements. If you’re unable to write it yourself, you can always consider some help.
- Relevance matters. Add career highlights to your profile. Make sure you count the most relevant ones to your current practice, focus, and business goals. This will make it easy for visitors to learn more about your work background and identity.
You can even consider creating a LinkedIn page for your law firm. This will improve its persona online.
We understand Twitter is not as popular for social media for law firms as other platforms. But the platform offers some unique benefits for busy legal professionals. Some of these are:
- Concise. Twitter acts as a microblogging social media platform. So your tweets can’t exceed the character count of 280. So succinct that you can never sound boring.
- Efficient. While scrolling your Twitter feed, you can cover main highlights and headlines for multiple issues in a short period.
- Instantaneous. The platform offers near-instant updates on news, what’s trending, and all information you need.
For those using Twitter as a part of social media marketing for lawyers, ensure you follow influential people in your industry. This can be both – a source of social media inspiration and to connect with people who share content about the issues you and your target audience care about.
YouTube
YouTube isn’t a popular choice of social media marketing for attorneys and law firms. But an active YouTube channel can help you share relevant video content with your subscribers. Videos make it simpler to convey your identity to viewers. While creating YouTube videos for your firm, make sure:
- You have enough high-quality content to upload. Everything from the titles, video quality, and lighting should be clear and professional.
- You have a strong on-camera presence. While on camera, be comfortable and confident.
- You have a strong message to convey. Use them to reflect authority. Ensure your content is engaging, comply with ethics rules and applicable guidelines.
Instagram, now owned by Facebook, is a popular image-and video-centered platform. It might not be the ideal fit of social media for a law firm. If you specialize in consumer-focused areas of law: personal injury, it’s a great medium to engage on an individual level. For big-scale law firms, Instagram might be suitable to represent yourself as the right place to work and hunt top talent.
Instagram as social media marketing for lawyers can help humanize yourself and your firm. Post content inspired by your lifestyle, community work, and firm life to leave a positive impression.
Tips to maintain a professional Instagram page as a law firm:
- Keep content visible. Use hashtags and location tagging wherever applicable.
- Images. Always post high-quality photos to convey a solid, polished, professional persona.
- Guidelines & ethics. Pay extra attention to all the ethics, guidelines, and never accidentally break confidentiality with your client’s information while posting anything. Never post behind-the-scenes photos of your office where client documents may be visible or readable.
The Closing Argument
By now, you know social media for lawyers has tons of opportunities. You can even utilize the best social media marketing tool for attorneys to promote services and engage your prospects.
Whatever you do – manual or automated, ensure you get the social media basics right. Then you can proceed to other ideas we’ve shared in this blog to guide you. You can also review your competitors’ social media strategies and activities to get new ideas and inspiration.
So are you ready to promote your law firm on social media?
We’re here to boost your business on social media with our automated post scheduler Practina! Give it a try to check out some amazing features that can level up your attorney game in the industry!
