Social Media for Lawyers That Matters

Why social media for law firm marketing is like Tabasco sauce

Through social media, lawyers can extend their reach and create meaningful connections with current and potential clients. With the right approach, social media can personalize a firm’s lawyers as well as educate clients on difficult subjects.

What is the right approach? Our two decades of social media marketing has revealed the best recipe: a good mix of content, posted consistently, and supportive of law firm marketing strategy.

However, poster beware. Social media should act primarily as a teacher and reputation builder. Otherwise, it has strict limitations as an introduction to prospective legal clients who don’t already know about you.

Social media generally works best for entertainers, sports stars and other celebrities. For attorneys, however, a little goes a long ways.

Jump to:

How SM helps SM guidelines Primary platforms

Tip: Choose educational posts over “Look at me!” promotion

Social media can connect with a target audience through a relaxed and personal style of communications. For most social media influencers, it is a medium of attitude, likes, shares, and a zillion selfies.

However, while Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok et al has made “look at me!” grandstanding posts more respectable, for service professionals such as lawyers, it serves best as another digital educational tool.

This basically eliminates use of silly dog and cat video posts – with very rare exceptions. Yet that does not mean a law firm’s social media should be boring.

For example, one Vanguard client attracted some positive attention for his prowess in boomerang throwing. Another found herself busier than ever serving owners of French bulldogs, all because of her professed devotion to the breed.

However, as a rule of thumb, posts by lawyers and law firms should be no less than at least a 80-20 mix of educational versus personal content.

How does social media for lawyers work best?

Law firms should usually focus on posts that answers questions to their target audience’s questions. Sample questions, depending on a practice’s focus, might include:

• In real estate law, what’s the different between a covenant and an equitable servitude? (Short answer: monetary damages versus injunction.)
• In family law, can a legal marital separation involve alimony (spousal maintenance) or child support? (Generally, yes.)
• In immigration law, if an adult family member holds a green card, can other family members be eligible for green cards, too? (Yes, a parent who holds a green care through Lawful Permanent Resident status can file a form I-130 to petition for an unmarried child younger than age 21 to be added as a derivative beneficiary.)

Remember, most prospective legal clients will find a firm’s social media posts only after learning about the firm elsewhere – usually through the firm’s website found via an internet search engine.

Let’s not lose sight of how most prospective clients find attorneys. Our research has found that every day, search engine users look for legal information online 42,587 times.

To be sure, social media platforms may generate results for generic searches such as “divorce lawyer Buffalo” or “personal injury attorney San Diego.” But the results tend to generate only a few hundred followers at most.

Rather, the golden reality is that website visits motivate client prospects to check out a firm’s social media presence. Why? Because social media users can see what others are saying about the firm on social media.

By comparison, Lady Gaga has nearly 61 million Instagram followers. And the queen of social media, Taylor Swift, has amassed 280 Instagram followers.

Related Reading: Law Firm Marketing FAQ

How many social media followers should lawyers expect?

In the end, social media has two objectives in law firm marketing. First, it can validate a law firm’s expertise and reputation.

Social media’s big advantage is the ability of users to like and share posts, which spreads awareness and boosts a firm’s authoritative knowledge across a platform. A firm’s post showing up in other people’s social media feeds is a consumer endorsement of useful information. Like they say, you can’t buy advertising like that.

Second, when a post is linked to a page on the same topic on a firm’s website, it can send social media users to a firm’s website to access more in-depth information. An effective social media program can drive thousands of visitors to a firm’s website, where they continue the journey to becoming a bona fide client

Even so, law firms have nothing on Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift on quantities of social media followers. Any firm breaking into the four-figure count of followers (more than 999) is doing better than most.

How often should law firms post to social media?

A frequent mistake of law firms is delegating a social media specialist to spend much or most of the job posting incessantly. The return on investment is both measurable and almost always disappointing.

Years of experience have shown that a minimum of one post per week per platform will get traction over time. Two per week is probably optimal, depending on the quality of posts.

Any more than that means firms run the risk of follower fatigue – users begin to tire of what they see in their feeds as excessively repeated appearances by a commercial enterprise. Next thing you know, you’re losing rather than gaining followers.

Unfortunately, commercial messages have flooded the most popular social media platforms with commercial messages. On a typical day on Facebook, a user is sorting through an advertisement or promotion for every few non-commercial posts. Never forget that someone can unfollow you just as fast as he or she can follow you.

Takeaways for social media marketing for attorneys

The objective of social media use in the legal profession is to act both lawyer like, as in wise and informed, and personable. For the legal and healthcare professions alikeExisting and potential clients are looking for a.

Most importantly, social media can enhance and echo larger marketing strategies. Consistency in messaging, values, and imagery across social media, the web, in print materials, and other marketing media can build a firm’s brand recognition and trust.

Of course, at the heart of all marketing is brand strategy – a conceptual plan that springs from inherent qualities of any organization that appeal to its customer base.

A brand is nothing more than a claim of distinction. The strongest brands have the clearest differentiation apart from competitors. A firm’s brand should drive social media management and serve as the heart of all marketing.