Top Social Media Optimization Strategies that Law Firms Need to Consider

0:00 – Introduction to Social Media Optimization for Law Firms

Digital marketing has emerged as an important aspect of doing business in any industry. Law firms are no exception in this case as more and more people rely on online resources to find the right solutions for their legal problems. Social media optimization plays an important role in a successful law firm marketing strategy. Social media optimization services provide an effective yet cost-friendly way to improving online visibility, strengthen the reputation of the brand and generate additional leads for legal practice. However, with emerging technology advancements, effective management of social media platforms has become extremely challenging. Let’s go over some key benefits of social media for law firms including yours as well as examples to these key benefits.

0:56 – Benefits of Social Media for Law Firms

With the immense popularity of several social media platforms, if your law firm doesn’t interact with the public on at least one or two social media platforms, it is as good as remaining invisible. This could prove to be a huge missed opportunity as law firms that still struggle to implement effective social media marketing strategies may fail to attract prospective clients, build valuable engagements, and generate quality leads. It is important to understand the value of social media for law firms including yours, and whether it is really worth the time and effort. Here discussed are some top ways in which your law firm can benefit from social media –

1:41 – Generate Brand Awareness – People tend to spend more time on social media. As per the reports from Sprout Social 2019 index, about 44 percent of consumers have reported an increase in personal social media usage. What does that mean for you? Clearly, for your law firm, if you are not using social media, I’ll lets you know that having your brand be able to get more visibility is easier than ever. Just offer these reports as well as just using a common sense that people are jumping on to social media a lot more. This gives you the opportunity to figure out what ways are more engaging for your customers. Also, what your competitors are doing that you’re not doing or what you’re doing that your competitors are doing.

2:33 – Attract Prospective Clients – Utilizing social media platforms is one of the best ways to attract new clients. The American Bar Association found that 35 percent of lawyers who use social media professionally have been able to gain new clients as a result. So, as I was mentioning in generating brand awareness, it’s the same thing in attracting prospective clients. This is the way that you can figure out, okay, what ways can I drive new leads, what ways am I doing that’s actually working as opposed to things that I’m doing that’s not working, wasting in a lot of time, taking the money, God forbid, and then from there, you can go ahead and figure out how to fine tune, how to get these prospective clients and then from there, turn them into leads.

3:22 – Improve SEO Efforts – There is a definite correlation between improved social signals and search engine rankings. Google continues to increasingly bring in dynamic content such as social feeds into search results. Therefore, building a strong social presence may help in controlling more visible space on search results for your law firm.

3:48 – Engage Target Audience Group – Social media networks offer valuable platforms for your law firm to remain engaged with their target audience groups by providing them with informative content, answering your queries, and resolving their issues. This gives you the opportunity to now be able to let your audience as well as new leads, your old leads know that – look the social media platform is where I can go ahead and get quick answers. I don’t have to rely on contacting them by phone or by email, which already usually gives people a feeling, no it might take some time to be able to reach back out to you — not the phone part but mostly the email. So of course, once you open up a social media lane it just let everybody know, look, we have multiple ways of being reached. So therefore, you want to start up a quick social media account, follow the quick examples of what you need to do, add your photos, etc., and then dive writing to how can I now show my informative content in different ways. This is where now you go into competitive analysis of looking into what your competitors are doing in social media. This doesn’t have to be hours’ worth of research. This could just be a couple of minutes, just kind of seeing and browsing to see what other people are doing and then from there you can start to kind of map out what you feel is best for you to do.

5:19 – Establish Thought Leadership – One of the important benefits of social media for law firms is that it can showcase their specific areas of expertise, thereby attracting prospective clients. Valuable information shared via these platforms can help establish brand credibility and win the trust of target audiences. As I mentioned before in the earlier tip, which is “Engage Target Audience Group”, here the best thing to do especially, say for instance – if you’re using Facebook, go to the group, or if you are using Twitter, find like-minded followers that are within that space, the industry that you are in.  Of course, we are talking about law firms, so find like-minded competitors that are within the law industry.  It doesn’t need to be in your specific niche within the industry, it could also be a little bit more general, but somewhat similar to what you’re doing. You could go into those followers, see what they are doing, check for those that are engaged in on a more constant basis and reach out to them. Of course, you don’t want to do any sales pitch, just do it as if you’re trying to see someone with some type of case that you’re doing. You are going to want to just go straight into liking some of their stuff on social media. Gradually warm up to them to let them know – look all right this account here is someone that’s in the same mindset as you and then from there you can slowly start to go into reaching out to them about – hey, I noticed on your post, you are dealing with this or a friend of yours on your account is dealing with this, are you aware of that or are you a friend of theirs or is it just a social media friendship – you could just ask questions to find little bit more about the person again. Treating it as you do with your business currently face to face matters, so if you treated the same way on social media online, no matter what platform you decide to use you can definitely gain the benefit out of it that way.

7:23 – Ways to Use Social Media for Law Firms – Now we going to go in to top ways to use social media full off for your law firm. With multiple social platforms available in each having its own unique and specific characteristics and quirks, it may be quite difficult to know where to start, let alone which platform is best to accomplish your goals with advancing a law firm in the right direction by personalizing your social media strategy to fit your ideal audience.

Here discussed are some important strategies that could help optimize your social media account or accounts.

7:57 – All right so the first one is – Get the Basics Right – Start the process by focusing on a couple of social media platforms that your audience uses the most. To know which ones are the best for you, evaluate social media goals, like whether the focus is to increase brand visibility, attracting clients or just engage the target audience group. In addition, evaluate what type of content needs to be created and how often it should be posted. So in this first section, in this first actionable tip, we’re basically saying that in order for you to get the basics right, just do a small groundwork right out the gate. This will be able to give you or understand enough how you supposed to target the audience group that you’re looking to target, what type of content is best for them, what ways to get them to engage with your content, and also what ways gets them to the engage with anything that you’re doing. So of course, look at the competitors, see what they are doing in each platform. If you choose to do kind of a lengthy stretch that way you can end up finding a lot of information in just an hour or two. And then of course, based on the content that you’re trying to push forward and the time frames that you have to deal with, your current clients as well as new clients coming in the door from local business, you know, marketing, you can end up figuring out the content calendar of how you want to post once you figure out the kind of skeleton of what’s working for the target audience you’re trying to reach.

9:39 – Find the Target Audience – Identifying the target audience group is vital in any law firm marketing strategy. The more clearly the target audience group gets defined, the better the chances of understanding how and where to reach the best prospects. Try to go beyond the concept of generalizations and define the target audience group more specifically. We can share how to do this specific to your business.  So comment below and a dedicated group will reach out to you. So of course in this section, we’re basically going into speaking on drilling down into the target audience that you’re looking for. So of course, depending on the social media account that you choose, then you can just comment within this post that’s online and then one of us will just reach out to you – either myself or someone within my team will reach out to you. But in this sense in order to get the target audience, you can check out BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo will give you an understanding of what content is driving engagement. So it shows you the platforms that are driving the most engagement for the type of content that you’re trying to push for it into the world in order to get more leads. So use buzzsumo.com and then you can start from there. It’s free but I think you should get a couple of uses before it asks you to sign up, create an account, and I think it goes straight to paying them. So it could be like a dress, where it ends up you have like 3 trials for the day and then it stops. But of course, just check to make sure that you can at least see, all right, if I know the type of content I want, see if you can get it from buzzsumo.com. Don’t go to Google search — just type in the content you are trying to push and then notice the types of searches that Google pop leads on that stage. Look this is the one that we feel are the best or people around the world are gravitating to these or putting these on the first page. Check these out once you do that you could kind of get an idea of or compare and contrast between all the competitors and content that they’re pushing and then you could kind of see – here are some similarities and here are some differences. What I am doing that’s different from them, how can I share for my target audience a better way so that they do want to reach back out to me.

.12:25 – Choose the Right Platform – The optimum social media channel may vary and depend on the specific area of the practice. Make sure to customize the content on each platform. In fact, most social media channels will give a basic overview of their target audience’s demographics. So, take a look through this and also keep an eye on industry reports and surveys that can reveal valuable information to help guide your decisions. Prepare a list of keywords pertaining to your law firm’s services, and start to explore which platforms already have conversations brewing on those topics. Find out more of the actionable tips for this bullet point in case one doesn’t work for you. Of course, in this section we’re choosing the right platform, we’re just breaking it up to state, once you figure out the kind of content that you’re trying to push, you can kind of understand the target audience that you want to go with or if you already know all of this, then knowing the type of platform on to best serve what you’re pushing will be the main thing to go after once you figure out: all right I know the audience I want, I know the type of content I want. Of course, you can’t just throw it up on any platforms because not all platforms are going to have the engagement that you’re looking for, for your audience. So being too general is not really going to help — you wanna kind of drill down into the one that’s best. So if you want to go ahead and create a bunch of accounts, go ahead, this is a good way to test without busting your brain and taking away from again, the main focus – the current clients that you have to deal with, court cases, and all that stuff. So, the best thing to do, join all, as much accounts as you feel you can update, set up orders to respond in terms of social media Hootsuite, Buffer and there’s a couple others that pretty much let you schedule posts and then it would just put the post out into the platform that you signed up for. And then from there after about 2 weeks you’ll start to see, all right, which one is giving me the most engagement which was giving me the most eyes or impressions. Here, once you figure that out then you can just drill down all right these are the ones that most people are looking into as opposed to these platforms I’m using here and then you can drill down even further.  All right now I’m going to get specifically more in-depth content that’s supposed to be helpful or something that’s supposed to get sales easily. So you split test to see which one is working in terms of the right platform.

15:09 – Okay as I was just speaking on scheduling social media posts in advance, here’s the next bullet point. Effective and successful social media marketing strategy for attorneys or law firms requires sheer timing, especially since social media posts can have a short shelf life. For instance, Twitter is considered one of the most complex platforms wherein the posts disappear the fastest depending on the number of followers. On the other hand, the reach of Facebook posts depends on Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm that takes into account how relevant and engaging the post was for the audience. In short, the timing of social media posts helps reach out to the maximum number of followers and fans. Try to maintain consistency by scheduling the posts in advance. Draft a monthly content calendar, and outline what content your firm wishes to feature, and when it will be deployed. So here, basically it goes double back into what I was mentioning – your law firm – depending on what your main focus is within the law firm you can drill down into understanding which one of the platforms based on the small actual tip I mentioned in choosing the right platform. So, once you kind of figure that out, you can go right into scheduling posts. Go straight to Google and look up social media post scheduler and then you’ll see some paid ones, you see some free ones. I mentioned some paid ones in choosing the right platform bullet point.  So check those out and I think some of them are paid and free at the same time, but doing that Google search will give you mostly a wider selection basically. So once you schedule the posts, remember what I mentioned — check out how many views you’re getting per post or impressions. Check out which ones are giving you some type of engagement, also check out which ones are giving you more followers. So these are the ones you kind of want to pay more attention to and gravitate more to because people within those platforms are showing more interest. So therefore you can slowly go right into getting more leads that way, as well as doing more promotions in getting more visibility and awareness around what you’re trying to do.

17:37 – Next step is Share Valuable Blog Posts and News Updates – One of the best ways to use social media for law firms is to create informative content rather than simply promotional ones. The more credible and informational content a law firm offers, the higher will be its opportunity to showcase your level of expertise. Last thing to do is to make sure not to limit to the content from your own blog. Make a habit of curating content from other relevant sources and reputable industry blogs. So, in this section, if you don’t have already content, use other people’s content but curate it – turn it into your experiences and what you’ve dealt with and base it on what that person is already seen. So if you like the content that’s there already, switch it around and edit it to your experience and then from there shunt it back out to the world or shunt it out back to the platform section that you’re using to whoever you are answering the question for or just you know trying to get some traction going. So share valuable blog posts in news updates, will usually get you in the gain, because it’s depending on the type of person that you’re looking to gain and again depending on the goal that you’re trying to attain will give you a real good key into the types of blog posts that you should be putting out there. Yeah, that’s basically it.

19:09 – Publish Brand Story – Law firms can use social media platforms to convey their brand story as this may be highly effective for humanizing the brand, forming an emotional connection with the audience, and winning their trust and loyalty. On site, you’ll see an example by White and Case LLP showcasing their stories and more. With just this example alone, you can duplicate and improve on what they have done to benefit your law firm.

19:37 – Post Informative Graphics – Visuals play a critical role in social media marketing as they are more likely to stand out over text in content. The social content strategy should focus on creating visuals that will immediately attract and engage prospects. Reports from Mobile Monkey suggest that posts with images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only ones. The quick tips given within this bullet points are particularly important if a business is planning on utilizing image-heavy platforms like Instagram. Okay, so within published brand story and posting informative graphics, they go hand in hand, because this is how you can showcase what your law firm is all about, the industry that you’re in and you drill down into the niche that you’re focusing on. This is the best time for you to be able to showcase –look we are human, we are just like you, we also have issues, the only difference is, we are the experts, we know how to get ourselves out of the issue that you’re currently going through, here’s how. So you could show the stories in order to showcase, all right I’m not lying, what I’m saying is true, we have a bunch of proof, as well as posting informative graphics will give them a quick tidbits of these examples.

21:07 – Record and Share Videos – Informative videos are a vital element in social media marketing for law firms. Videos not only make information much easier to understand but also allow injecting brand personality into the content to make them more engaging. According to Social Media Today, 78 percent of people watch videos online every week, and 55 percent of those watch every day. Use professional videos to share updates about your law firm, answer FAQs, conduct interviews with industry thought leaders and use their clout to attract new viewers and showcase the culture of the law firm.

21:50 – Next step would be – Use Popular and Relevant Hashtags – When it comes to the optimization of social media accounts, hashtags play an important role as these provide audiences an additional way to locate a law firm. The use of hashtags should not be limited to just one platform but should also be used on other platforms. Learn about the terms influencers in the legal niche are using, and create your own hashtags to promote your marketing campaign. Who knows, that hashtag may become synonymous with your brand.

22:31 – The next thing is Respond to Comments and Queries – Very, very important bullet point. Social media channels offer an effective platform to build connections and engage with audiences. In fact, social media is generally used as a brand-consumer communication channel. Make the most of social media to engage with prospective clients. Respond to comments on the posts and answer questions that people may have about specific services. Create an impression among your audience that your firm is listening to your questions and answers. As per a Sprout Social Index (2019) report, about 47 percent of consumers reach out to brands on social media because they have a product or service question. On the other hand, 40 percent do so because they have a bad experience, while 31 percent do so to share their ideas or suggestions. So of course, within the response to comments and queries bullet point, use popular and relevant hashtags bullet point, record and share videos bullet point, you can definitely see different ways that you can play around in order to gain the type of audience that you’re looking for. So, for instance, the relevant hashtags, this is a good moment to find out what hashtags have been used over the years for the specific path that you using that are garnering a lot of post usage as well as the opportunity for you to slowly create a hashtag that might blow up really fast or take some time to blow up in terms of a specific experience – use a hashtag for it and you have so many cases with that experience. You can have a bunch of infographics shown. Comments and queries for this type experience, and once you put it up, and you have the hashtag, just keep being used. The commenting and going back and forth with people that are having those experiences, you can definitely gain some traction for that hashtag and have it become something that the social media platform see as, oh look this is a new hash tag people are using it a lot, who is this synonymous with — your law firm. So, these are just different ways that you can play around with your social media accounts and just see which one is working the best. Of course, someone like us, we can definitely automate this whole process so that you don’t have to worry about it, you are focusing on you know what’s more important to you which is your business – your current customers, people that are depending on you.

25:16 – Invest in Paid Ads – Paid advertising in social media could help finely target your specific audience group. Users provide an abundance of data in their profiles, allowing firms to target individuals who are most likely to convert. Repurpose the content being used for daily posts, and turn them into targeted ads.

25:38 – Conclusion – As discussed above, there are different ways or opportunities to utilize social media for marketing your law firm’s services and engaging prospects. Keep in mind that it takes time to build brand awareness and adopt a tribe of followers, so don’t get discouraged if results aren’t immediate. Sticking to the above-mentioned social media strategy checklist will help your law firm to remain focused on their ROI goals.

So of course, if you doing the last bullet point which goes right into investing in paid ads and in this section of course if you have the budget for it doing paid ads will give you a quicker response as we mentioned within the article, if you read further into it.  Again, I’m just giving you a summarized version of this whole article. So, your best bet is always just to go right back into the full article to get everything that you need and just ask questions, let us know where you’re stuck, what questions that you need answers so that you can accomplish whatever goal you need or if you’re looking for a full strategy, reach out and give us a comment and let us know, myself or one of the staff members will be able to address this issue. So if you have the paid – going back to the paid ads bullet point – if you have the cash flow this gives you that opportunity as I mentioned to get awareness, get the traction going quickly. The only thing is that as we mention in the article is that you still kind of use SEO in the sense of the content that you have that’s already seen there, not content that’s written, but again experiences, cases that you can go back to increase, some type of diagram if you want or a graphic or you can just do a bullet point, really quick now, of everything that was done, how to solve it etc. You can go back to those content and even though it’s being pushed on SEO, Google, Yahoo, Bing, at the same time you can have ads coming straight to it so it can give a double good effect in terms of organic visibility going up and within the paid ads you’re getting a lot of traction quickly. So of course, I look forward to you reading the full article. Apart from that hope these tips were helpful. Take care.