Guide to Social Media for Lawyers and Law Firms

Last Updated: Nov 25, 2022

Guide to Social Media for Lawyers and Law Firms image

Tested and proven law firm social media marketing strategies & tactics

Lawyers are well-known to be excellent communicators, but the rules of communication for social media marketing are different from other forms of communication.

When looking at the various options to promote your law firm using modern marketing, social media is often overlooked or not maximized in the field of law, despite its enormous potential to reach a large number of your firm’s target audience. Many law firms often view the idea of sharing and engaging on social media as a distraction; therefore, social media is not prioritized. However, this approach could be detrimental to your firm’s business.

If your law firm or law practice is struggling to use social media impactfully, this could be a significant missed opportunity, as effective social media marketing for law firms has the potential to bring in new clients and build positive relations with connections to create real value.

Our latest article will offer suggestions to support your firm in improving its social media marketing strategies.

We hope that once you have read through our suggestions, you will better understand how social media can benefit your law firm and how your lawyers can make the most of the online platforms.

What are the benefits of social media marketing for law firms?

In today’s online world, there is no option to avoid social media for business: your competitors, clients, and colleagues use it, so if you want your law firm to keep up with business trends, you need to have a strong presence.

Social media can help attract new clients

Effective social media marketing offers vast exposure to a large audience. People continue to use social media regularly, and the usage trends are still growing. Therefore, having a strong presence across the right social networks for your law firm’s brand will help you share your message with the appropriate audience demographic to build brand awareness and loyalty.

Social media offers potential clients another way to discover your law firm

Optimizing your firm’s social media profiles can attract more people to your law firm’s website, increasing your chance of bringing in potential clients as they can explore the information about your services they need to hire your firm. This is the same across many industries and is a proven tactic.

One example is if you prepare an article about how to invest in property in Hong Kong and use this blog article as a social media post on Facebook.

Potential clients can see the Facebook post and click through to read the content on your website, where you have added a contact form or contact details for more information about your services.

The prospective client fills in the contact form or gets in touch with your firm via email. You then have a new lead to follow up on. This will support your lead generation from Lawzana, where you can put your lead generation on autopilot by signing up for membership and letting your leads come to find you daily via our effective, novel, and high-traffic directory.

Social media creates a platform to engage with your audience

Your firm's lawyers can leverage the power of social media to boost their online profile and status within the legal community to benefit the firm. By engaging with social networks in collaboration with other lawyers, your lawyers can keep up-to-date with the latest conversations in the legal community and add their views to enhance your lawyer and law firm’s thought leadership status.

Moreover, your target audience uses social media to consume content and discover brands. By engaging with your target audience in the right way on social media, you have a good chance of converting them into prospects and then even clients. For example, you could use social media to share informative and engaging content with your target, answer your audience’s questions, address their problems, and build up the conversation to establish trust with your law firm.

Social media can improve your law firm’s search engine optimization (SEO)

If you have not yet read our guide to SEO for law firms, we recommend you do, here. Even though social signals do not provide a direct ranking factor, there is a relationship between enhancing social signals and boosting your firm’s search engine ranking. To add to this, Google does leverage content from social feeds in their search results, so a clear social media presence will allow you to control your law firm’s brand by gaining control of that space. Making a coordinated effort with your social media profiles will improve your firm’s online presence, contributing to overall enhancements in terms of online visibility and supporting your website traffic growth.

How to set up an effective social media strategy:

 Best practices

Now we established that social media for law firms has the potential to be highly valuable; the next step is creating a solid strategy to maximize your chance of generating a return on investment (ROI). Having a plan to set your firm up for success is essential. At Lawzana, we recommend that your social media and marketing plans, in general, should be unique to your firm, as you will have your practice areas and different audience segments; however, the principles we will share below can be a blueprint for your social media marketing to help get set up.

Understand the guidelines

Your firm and your lawyers must understand the rules and responsibilities lawyers must retain on social media platforms in your area of work and location before making yourself or your firm accountable on social media.

It is a good idea to review your local compliance responsibilities and ethics rules and adhere to them before posting or sharing any information.

Set clear objectives

What is your goal for using social media? Would you like to get more clients? Would you like to create enhanced brand awareness in the legal community? Or are you simply looking for more website visitors?

Setting SMART goals that are realistic and attainable across a chosen time period for your social media marketing is essential. Once you have clear goals in mind, these objectives serve the practical purpose of guiding your social media program.

Conduct solid research

Be sure to review what your competitors are doing on social media, how they engage with their audience, present their practice areas or services and share information. By identifying what works and does not work for other law firms, you can understand what approach will work best for your prospective clients.

Another way of doing this is by identifying relevant legal influencers in your field. Then you can follow them, share their content if appropriate, and engage with their online communities to build your brand’s presence.

Begin small

Even though it may be necessary to research what social media platforms work best for your firm, you should do this research prior to creating a presence on any social media network.

By creating multiple social accounts, you are less likely to have the time, resources, and motivation to dedicate the appropriate focus and attention to each of them. This can set up a situation where your firm potentially commits ethics violations or abandons the social media profiles, which is harmful to your law firm’s brand as it demonstrates that you are not actively engaged.

It is a good practice to consider when setting up a social media profile if you can realistically maintain the profile. Good social media networks to start with at this time for law firms are LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

Plan your content

By planning the types of content you will be creating to share on your social media profiles, you will have a clear picture of creating content that could work for your target audience. Perhaps you intend to create new content to support your law firm’s marketing plan, or share your current content, or even if you plan to focus on engaging with your audience by answering their questions in the comments. In summary, it’s essential to reflect on what you believe your target audience is looking for to create the right content mix as part of your social media marketing strategy.

Create a schedule

Developing a content strategy and calendar will allow you to consider the types of content that you will create and set up the posting frequency.

There are many online tools and templates to support you in creating a social media content calendar. By planning your content release in advance, you can set up a consistent schedule designed to deliver the results you are looking for. Moreover, by planning ahead of time, you will be able to set up a review process prior to publishing which can reduce the chances of mistakes or accidentally violating ethics rules or client confidentiality by posting in a less organized manner.

By creating consistency in your content schedule, your law firm’s brand will have a clear visual appearance, allowing you to build and maintain a strong social media presence and boost your chances of engaging successfully with your target audience.

Track your results

As with all marketing and law firm business strategies, it is critical to monitor, measure, and evaluate the results of your social media marketing results to control and optimize. By tracking which areas of your content marketing are working best and what types of content are not effective, you will be able to identify the best content for your audience and objectives and allocate the budget appropriately and efficiently.

Best social media tactics:

Share infographics with relevant data

Visuals are important in social media marketing as they allow your content to stand out from the competition and enhance your overall message. Your social media content strategy must include the tactic of creating attractive visuals that will draw in and engage potential clients.

Examples could include sharing inspirational quotes, handy legal tips, fundamental legal information, and legal updates through infographics that will allow your law firm to stand out. People online do not spend much time absorbing large pieces of text, so an attractive image can help capture their attention. If you do not have an in-house graphic designer, there are many free design platforms such as Canva, or you could consider hiring a freelance graphic designer who can often do jobs on a piece-by-piece basis or monthly/quarterly quota agreement.

Listen in on conversations that involve your firm

One of the principal reasons for social media for lawyers can be brand listening, particularly for larger law firms. Your firm can set up branded keyword searches on social media to extract content and conversations that are taking place involving your law firm’s brand name. This is essential to understand your audience, see what clients and prospects are saying about your firm, and gauge the current mood. Staying on top of social conversations will also help your firm avoid being caught off-guard and reduce your exposure to negative PR.

For smaller firms that may not have brand mentions, you can select keywords related to topics where your firm would benefit from joining the conversations by demonstrating expertise, such as identifying the latest laws and policies and adding value to the discussion around topics that are most relevant to your firm’s areas of expertise. 

There are many social listening tools to leverage to support your brand’s listening efforts. Some free tools to consider include Google Alerts or mention.net; however, there are a wealth of paid services available depending on your budget. Using these tools, your firm will be able to monitor conversations, often in real-time, with the paid services and identify what topics are currently trending in your work area. Listening tools can support your firm in gaining valuable audience insights and taking the appropriate action at the right moment.

Making video content

Creating informative and attractive videos is important in social media marketing for lawyers. Consumption of video content continues to increase, so it is an excellent way to tap into this trend. Video content can make your information much more understandable and accessible, allowing you to present your brand by adding your law firm’s personality to the video content. This creates a possibility of generating more engagement compared with other content formats; depending on your target audience demographic; they may prefer consuming video content over text content. 

Creating regular, quality video content that clearly explains relevant topics, shares interesting information in an engaging manner, and discusses trending topics will put your law firm in an excellent position to create success with your video content. Another take on it is conducting interviews with industry thought leaders and leveraging their expertise and network to attract prospective clients.

Create blog articles and news updates

One of the most proven methods for law firms to effectively use social media is to create content that informs, as opposed to hard-sell or promotional content. It is a good approach to share reliable and valuable information with your target audience, as this will give your law firm a platform to showcase your expertise.

Potential clients are highly unlikely to select a firm purely based on promotional power when looking for a suitable law firm. They are much more likely to evaluate based on their list of the firms’ knowledge, credibility, expertise, and experience before selecting which law firm to hire.

This is why it’s a good idea to share informative blog posts with your social media audience consistently with the latest legal updates. Not all content needs to be unique or from your blog, as long as it is relevant and informative. Your firm can add value by supplementing your content mix with curated content from other relevant and reliable sources.

Reply to comments and questions

Social media offers the possibility to build connections and engage with your community. Many people now use social media as a brand-to-consumer (B2C) communication method.

Be sure to take the chance to use social media to engage with your community. You can do this by replying promptly to comments on your social media posts and answering questions that people may have about your firm or areas of expertise. By doing this effectively, you will demonstrate to your audience that you are listening and that you are there to support them.

Build your law firm’s brand

Law firms should use social media as an opportunity to share their brand story. This can be an effective way of humanizing your brand and creating an emotional connection with your social media audience. These kinds of actions help in building trust and loyalty with potential clients.

Examples include sharing information about your firm’s milestones, history, and events. Another good way to use social media to humanize your brand is by presenting your employee profiles in social media posts which will support your firm in putting a human face to your services.

Conclusion

There are many opportunities to leverage social media to market your law firm’s services and engage with potential clients.

It is important to get the social media fundamentals right by establishing a strong and consistent presence, and then your firm can test some of the strategies and tactics we have shared in this article to see what works best for your firm. Another critical step is to keep an eye on your competitors’ social media strategies to keep up to date and to get new ideas.

Lawzana offers lead generation benefits with all paid memberships, and we encourage you to keep your Lawzana profile up to date to maximize your chance of generating new leads. Lawzana provides marketing and web development services; if you have any questions related to social media for law firms or law firm marketing in general, please do not hesitate to contact our expert team at [email protected]