By now, you must know that social media marketing for attorneys is an increasingly important tool to gain new clients. It is pretty much impossible for any firm that wants to be taken seriously to avoid the major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These days it is expected that you maintain an active presence on all of these sites at a minimum.
The problem is that effective attorney marketing through social media is time consuming. The use of these platforms is all about building relationships, and just like building a personal relationship in the real world, they take time and effort to develop and nurture. Most law firms are not willing to do what it takes to use social media marketing the right way. If you follow these few simple guidelines, you will find that you can build a strong social media presence more efficiently.
The first thing to remember is that it is considered tacky to show off constantly. Social media marketing is to provide useful information 90% of the time and to sell 10% of the time. If you had a friend who was constantly pushing you to purchase items from their business, you probably wouldn’t be friends very long. That’s why, somewhat counter-intuitively, it is actually a more effective sales technique to push for the sale less frequently. The standard rule of thumb is an 90-10 split, meaning 90% of your posts should be purely social or informational, with the other 10% being your sales pitch to your followers. For the same reason, you want to make sure that the content you actually provide is valuable in some way to your potential clients. Whether you are trying to be funny, helpful, or interesting, there should be some reason why they want to read what you have to say. Providing actual content for your followers is the best way to keep them engaged with you.
Along the same lines, make sure that what you are posting actually relates to the field you work in. Whatever your area of expertise, all of your posts should be in that general arena. While an occasional personal post can provide a human connection between you and your clients, the majority of the content you produce should be information that is relevant to your niche. You want to portray yourself as an expert in whatever field you are working in. As an attorney you have to work hard to avoid being too technical. Minimize legalese, if you want people to actual care about what you are posting.
Twitter is arguably the most important social media platform for attorneys to engage with because of the wide variety of substantial, professional conversations that are taking place every day. So how do you get in on the discussion? One way is to use Twitter Cards to include photos, videos, and other multimedia content in your tweets, considerably increasing your click rate, which in turn drives traffic to your firm’s website. Another method of gaining attention on Twitter is to use hash tags to include your tweets in the discussion of certain subjects. Twitter is also one of the best networking tools.
A final important rule to follow when using social media marketing for attorneys is to create a separate landing page that you send your visitors to when they click your content. The benefit of this is that you can target the information on that page directly toward signing up new clients, and also keep track of how effective your efforts in the social media realm have been.
photo credit: Social media chart