In 2020, 3.6 billion people around the world were using social media, with that number projected to grow to 4.41 billion by 2025. Since social media is part of daily life for most people, why wouldn’t attorneys use it to spread the word about their practice?
With more eyes on social media than ever, utilizing it as part of your overall marketing strategy is critical to the success of your business. Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube — and yes, maybe even TikTok — social needs a place in your advertising toolkit.
Keep reading to learn how your social media presence can translate into tangible results for your firm.
Is your law firm’s marketing working? Download the guide to find out.
Know the rules before you start
As an attorney, you are familiar with the Bar rules governing professionalism & ethics in lawyer advertising — but is your team? Whether you employ an in-house specialist, a team, or have external help with your social media management, ensure your team understands its legal marketing compliance responsibilities.
A central point of truth can be a good idea, such as a copywriting guide with examples of approved language, as well as links to ethics regulations and resources like the American Bar, your state Bar and other approved sources. This way, those working on your behalf know where to look when in doubt.
It’s also a good idea to personally review content on a regular basis prior to publishing it on your channels. Remain current with updates to advertising and marketing rules by the American Bar to ensure ongoing compliance with ethical responsibilities.
Decide what’s best for your firm
Maybe you have a robust marketing strategy that includes a mix of marketing activities. Maybe you’re kicking off your marketing journey and need help figuring out social.
Start with your goals.
As you determine which social platforms to add to your toolkit, first look to your business goals and answer some questions about how social media can help your firm attain them:
- Do you need more clients, and therefore you want to drive more consultations?
- Are you trying to increase brand awareness around your firm in the community?
- Is it something in between, like nurturing leads, prospects and customers by providing valuable content authored by your firm?
Social media marketing allows you to answer yes to all three. Whether you decide to implement paid or organic social media activities on your platform(s) of choice, your content strategy should reflect the different stages of the marketing funnel.
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Organic or paid?
You may have heard that you need to do paid versus organic social media, or you may be aware that your top competitors are using one or the other. Most competitive lawyers will use a mix of both to achieve different goals and appeal to people in different stages of the buyer journey.
Organic
Organic social media refers to building an organic or natural audience around your channel — that is, not supported by paid promotion. Organic social is a longer-term strategy where the audience is cultivated through engaging, educational, relevant content.
But remember, people use social media to escape from reality, so use the 80/20 rule: 80% of your content adds value and 20% promotes your firm. Meaning, four out of five posts edutain (educate + entertain) people on topics related to the area of law you practice, and one post promotes a free consultation. For promotional posts, one way to prove ROI on organic social is with call tracking.
Considering the buyer journey and what your firm can offer individuals at each stage is a good way to create content themes that drive your posting strategy. For example, a personal injury firm might create upper-funnel or awareness content around common mistakes people make after an accident, go live on their channel to answer legal questions, or even share answers to an ask me anything prompt.
For attorneys that are newer to social, you can go live on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn with the platform’s live feature. Do this spontaneously or promote it in advance to your audience — but be sure you’re featuring something your audience cares about. Similarly, ask me anything sessions can be done on Instagram or Facebook Stories, a YouTube video, or really any channel. Your audience will ask you questions and you’ll answer cleverly and transparently. Good luck!
Mid-funnel or consideration-stage content can position the firm as the solution to people’s pain points by promoting testimonials of clients that benefited from working with the firm. Finally, conversion-focused content promotes a free consultation or similar offer to get leads to pick up the phone or fill out a form.
Paid
Paid social media refers to the paid promotional content that appears on your social channels. There are various options across the different platforms, such as dynamic Facebook Ads, sponsored Instagram posts, promoted Tweets, YouTube video ads — the possibilities are many. With paid social, you determine the result you want and allocate funds to achieve it.
As with organic, you need to set your content strategy and create content to fuel the campaigns. But rather than cultivating the audience over time, the platform allows granular targeting of its audience — for a cost.
If your goals are top-of-funnel lead acquisition or general awareness, you’ll employ a paid social advertising campaign that reaches the largest audience possible based on the demographic filters you set. Your campaign creative will need to cast a wide net as well. Matrimonial, or divorce attorneys, for example, might promote a blog post about actions to take if you’re considering a divorce.
To further nurture leads that have already engaged with your brand on social or on your website, you’ll run a campaign that positions your firm as the unique solution to their challenges, like articles detailing favorable child support, custody and alimony settlements your firm has negotiated and the repeatable process you use to advocate for all clients.
How do your firm's marketing efforts measure up? Check out the 2022 Marketing outlook for law firms.
Choose your channels
You don’t need to be on every channel to have an effective social strategy. But, every channel has benefits. The demographics of your target audience and ideal clients should play a role in which channel(s) you market on.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world, with 2.9 billion monthly users.
54.2% of those users are in the 35-65+ age range with another 26.4% in the 25-34 age range. Given the buying power of the majority audience, Facebook is a powerful medium for marketing and advertising using organic and paid tactics.
If you already post on Facebook, be sure your content aligns with the buyer journey. If certain posts are performing well on organic, try boosting them with paid dollars to reach a larger audience. Use the top performing organic and boosted posts to drive the overall paid strategy.
Facebook Ads helps you get your firm’s message to the right audience, while staying within budget. Facebook targeting makes reaching a specific demographic simple and Facebook Insights helps you track your law firm’s ROI with detailed reporting.
Not to mention, if you are using Facebook, you can double your efforts by cross-promoting on Instagram — all from the same dashboard. Instagram’s age demographics skew younger, with 33.5% of users in the 25-34% age range and the platform has a more visual focus than Facebook — two points to consider as you allocate budget and resources.
Are you using these top marketing channels for law firms? Read the guide now.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. It’s a great place to network with other attorneys or find new talent, and your law firm may be underutilizing it. Either through organic posts or paid ads, you can use LinkedIn to generate awareness about your law firm’s brand and the legal services you offer, and drive high-value traffic to your law firm’s website.
Sharing thought leadership content from your personal account, such as analysis of current events and legal news, is a great way to establish yourself as an authority in the area of law you practice and promote your firm without being too salesy. Hint: use video content and watch engagement skyrocket.
For lawyers with a knack for words and thought leadership content, Twitter offers campaigns for increasing your followers and driving website traffic, among other goals – all of which can be tracked using Twitter analytics. Once you’ve decided on the messaging you’ll use to attract prospective clients, make sure you’re within the 280-character max for Tweets.
Potential Twitter content could include answering legal questions pertaining to your area of practice in an approachable way. Twitter is also a great place to interact with other users by replying to tweets and retweeting, given the platform’s emphasis on engagement.
For subjects that perform well in organic tweets and recurring themes in the ongoing Twitter conversation, you might create a longer-form asset like a blog post or ebook and promote it with Twitter Ads.
Does my firm need TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or that other latest platform?
Your firm does not need to be present on every single social media platform, but you’ll want to give an honest effort to the channels where you are. Be sure that the business profile is current and complete, with a professional image. Your content strategy should appeal to each stage of the buyer journey, and ladder up to the firm’s overarching goals.
If you are wondering whether your firm should create a TikTok or YouTube channel, or anything else, determine whether you are willing to put resources behind creating and promoting content people actually want to consume. These platforms can be highly effective for lawyers but are expensive to execute properly, so focus on a plan you can stick to.
The closing argument on social media for law firms
One day, your potential clients will need an attorney — and an effective social media strategy will ensure you’re the first one they think of.
To prove the ROI of your social marketing efforts and scale your best tactics, make sure you’re tracking the calls and forms that come from your social media efforts with a CallRail free trial.
