Social media can be a key strategy for differentiating your firm in highly competitive areas. Social media can help you create brand awareness, gain more clients, and attract young talent. It allows you to gain a better understanding your online reputation and helps you manage it, as well as giving you a vehicle for engagement, and the tools to reach your potential clients right where they live, work, and play.

Social Media and Distribution

For law firms looking to successfully market their firm in today’s digital environment, multi-channel distribution is key to brand awareness and the development of trust and credibility. There are three critical steps in developing a profitable web presence, they include:

1. Building your website and blog and populating both with really good content that is relevant to your areas of practice.
2. Implementing advertising strategies that include the creation of timely and compelling paid placements and wire distribution.
3. Generating backlinks through blog posts, articles, news, press releases, and any relevant forums that you have an interest in.

By using social media to tie these three steps together, you maximize their effectiveness and establish a growing base of interested readers.

Shareable Social Media Content is Effective Content

Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook and a vast array of other social media platforms, all rely on shareable content for their services to be effective, which is exactly why some firms have delayed using these tools, i.e., they don’t know what to say. Social intelligence tools (there are many available and most are customizable for your specific needs), help you figure out what to write about because they track relevant trends and topics and give insight into your potential clients’ wants and needs. These tools help you determine what type of article and blog post, video, and infographic topics would resolve those wants and needs.

One of the ‘wants’ the majority of your potential clients will have is the desire to get to know who you are before they hire you. Again, social media allows you to introduce yourself and form a relationship with those prospects. Social media also makes it extremely easy for past and current clients to review your services, provide testimonials, give referrals, and introduce you to their circles by sharing your content.

Effective Content for Law Firm Social Media

When writing, keep in mind the following best practices for creating effective content for social media.

Write for your audience.

• If you are writing for peers, there’s no problem with using legal jargon, however, when writing for a general audience, be sure to leave any legalese out of your content.
•  Absolutely allow your personality and passion come through in your writing, while maintaining professionalism, of course.
• Don’t be afraid to use keywords in your content, just make sure that you don’t overuse your keywords. Write for the reader and use keywords in a natural way.
• Break content into sections that are easily scanned. The easier you make it on the reader, the better.
• Use visual content as much as possible. Infographics, videos, and images convey information in a glance, which is perfect for phone, tablet, and desktop users. PDF or document downloads that detail the information given in the infographic or video can easily be made available for interested readers.

Social Media Has Its Place in Law Firm Marketing Strategies

Social media has a place in nearly all online marketing strategies, and when done correctly, social media can help you achieve an advantage over your competitors and build countless connections. However, no social media platform is going to make you famous or garner you thousands of new leads a day. Social media isn’t magic. Social media is only a tool that is used by law firms to enhance the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and increase brand awareness.

If you are just beginning with social media, don’t try to master all platforms at once and don’t feel like you have to be active on all of them either. (Though it is recommended that you set up an account and create a profile on all the most popular platforms just to keep someone else from using your name or your firm’s name). You can be just as effective on two social media platforms as someone who uses many, as long as what you are saying is valuable enough to motivate your audience to read and share.

Upcoming:

1. A case study of law firms doing a great job online

2. What not to do: a case study of law firms making big mistakes online

Teresa Shaw is an SEO expert with 10 years experience helping attorneys and law firms across the country increase public awareness of their services.