Lawyers Don’t Be Afraid to Market On Social Media
Many attorneys are still reluctant to market and engage on social media. Some of the fears are because of bar association policies. Some lawyers simply don’t have the time or the budget to make a significant investment on social media. Many law firms simply don’t have the staff necessarily to adequately dedicate to create social media assets, build paid social media campaigns, schedule posts, and engage with their social media communities. Regardless of what the reason is, it shouldn’t dissuade you from tapping this rich source of leads and traffic.
Amplify Your Existing Content
Are you trying to promote your existing content and assets? Are you wondering why your’re not getting enough visitors to new content pieces like blogs? Social media is a perfect place to promote your content from an organic and paid standpoint. Have your content pieces highlighted more by creating links directly to those content pieces which you have control of. With the ability to share content to your law firm’s social accounts, you also have the option to further amplify your content through sharing to groups on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. Using hashtags with the content you post on social platforms further amplifies and adds value by categorizing the content you shared for other audiences to be able to discover the content. Existing content that may be a bit older but still relevant can be given new life by being shared on social media.
Build Your Brand & Stand Out From Your Competitors
You most likely get a large number of leads through referrals based on your firm’s reputation and results. But outside of those word of mouth interactions how are people outside finding out about your great results for clients? Make your firm stand out on social media. Share your opinions and give expertise. You can create a weekly content segment where one of your attorneys answers generals question your firm may be getting.
Share your results and verdicts earned. Build your reputation on social by showing all those great results your law firm has achieved. Sharing your opinions, featuring places you have been published, and sharing your firm results are great ways to get additional media coverage. If one of your social posts go viral form something like marijuana reform in a state that recently legalized it, you may become the source for media coverage. This is a great way to get your content to get syndicated on larger media outlets as well. Tag your social posts with the appropriate location tags to make them hyper local.
Don’t Be Afraid Of Paid Social
If you are on social media and haven’t invested in paid social, now may be a good time. On most platforms, attention is still relatively cheap compared to paid search. Drive new visitors to your website that may need help with the areas of practice you focus on. Test smaller budgets and new ad types like story ads on Instagram. If your marketing budget is low, at least try to boost your social media posts to targeted audiences on Facebook. Depending what practice areas your firm focuses on, some platforms will be better fits than others. For example if your focus is business law, you may want to make LinkedIn a primary platform to focus on. The key is to test and track to understand effectiveness and results. With paid social, simply throwing everything against a wall and hoping something will stick will not be an effective strategy.
Create Unique Content Specifically For Social Media
A way to engage with social communities, is unique content specifically for those channels. As opposed to re-sharing your existing content, creating new content rich posts may add value and increase engagement on you social communities. There are features on social platforms that enable you to author content. For example, LinkedIn offers a feature called Pulse that you can post blog like content you create directly on the platform. Those posts are idexable in search engines that further enhances your brand as well as searchable on the LinkedIn platform. You also get extra visual real estate on your LinkedIn profile with a section that otherwise would be empty.
Won’t Hurt to Try
If your doing nothing as a firm or as an individual, this is the perfect time to try. Start small and post once a week if you don’t have time. Posting won’t be enough, social is a two way conversation. You need to also answer your community, find related individuals to engage with, and add opinions to related conversations. Have a thoughtful content strategy in mind. Audit your firm’s existing content inventory and identify opportunity to enhance with social. No matter what you do, the important thing is to get started. Learn more about digital marketing on the Nova Zora Digital site and the Nova Zora Digital Blog.
