Social media is such a valuable tool for businesses. As little independent platforms, your social media profiles on all platforms are living, breathing, mini-extensions of your brand and website. You can showcase and position your firm as modern, relatable, and engaging. Put simply, you can’t afford to miss out on it as a channel.
Social media marketing comes with so many benefits for law firms. You can generate brand awareness and engagement, attract new clients, network with leading experts, and showcase thought leadership expertise! While handling cases, managing employees, and conducting research is a busy and demanding job, there should always be time to grow your social network.
If you’re looking to find your mojo in the world of social media you need to get started with your own social media strategy! Here’s a few top tips to follow, and some examples of who’s getting it right!
Getting The Basics Right
Before we dive into the nitty gritty, every channel needs a set of fundamental building blocks. Without these foundations, you’ll struggle to build any results. So what are the basics of your social media strategy? Well it’s about determining the who, what, where, when, and why.
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- Who are you aiming to engage with? Essentially who is your target audience, and who or what drives them?
- Where are you planning to meet with your target audience? Where/which platform do they frequent? Some platforms will be better or worse for certain demographics.
- What type of content are you looking to post? What are the key topics/keywords that your audience is looking to find out about?
- When are you going to post, create, and share your content? A regular and consistent schedule is important.
- Why are you on social media? Are you aiming to grow engagement, boost credibility or improve traffic to your site?
Get the W’s right, and it’ll be the first ‘W’ in your social media strategy.
One of the other fundamental basics of your social media strategy is your content. You can’t just post whatever you want when you want too. Develop a consistent schedule, focusing on quality over quantity. How often are you posting, and how often are measuring results, are 2 key criteria as part of your content strategy. Adopt topics, keywords, and ideas that resonate with your key audience, and cater its style to each individual platform you’re posting on.
Use Visual Aids
Videos, images, podcasts, and infographics are all brilliant at making your content as engaging and interesting as possible. Social media is a sea of lost posts. There’s a feedback cycle with social media algorithms that goes sort of like this: The more engaging your content is, the more people engage with it. The more people engage with it, the more algorithms show it to new audiences. The more new audiences see your content, the more new audiences engage with it. And on and on.
Essentially, try to engage your audience with visual media, and your engagement will bring with it more engagement. Basic legal information, tips and tricks, some inspirational quotes, or anything else that could easily come in text format, try and jazz it up a bit. Utilise Canva for example, as a free design platform to create media, whilst there are plenty of other software options you can use, free or paid, to create videos, infographics, and other media.
Take Greenberg Traurig as an example. They are a fantastic example of a brand utilising LinkedIn exceptionally well. They post infographics, images, videos and podcasts to showcase all of their content, be it CSR projects, blog content, thought leadership interviews, or team building culture. Utilise media to boost your social media engagement.
Listen, Engage & Respond
Social media is a great way to listen to people. Before you jump in head-first take some time to listen to any positive or negative feedback, and anything in between. Look at any keywords that are relevant to your firm, or your area of expertise. You can also identify relevant conversations that you can weigh in on. Commenting, or at least being aware of current and trending affairs within your industry space is a great way to share, and avoid any negative PR.
Sprout Social’s 2021 social index highlights that audience engagement is the 2nd most important factor in determining best practices in any market. Engagement is also critical to garnering any form of brand loyalty.
Baker McKenzie
, for example, is one of the most responsive law firms on social media. They, and their employees, are constantly engaging with their audience across a host of platforms. They take time to thank everyone for their feedback or congratulations, while also entertaining any conversations from other users or in comments sections.
Share Your Story & Make It Personal
Social media is a way to connect. Fundamentally, people want to connect with people, so you do need to open up and share stories. Individual achievements, awards, community outreach programmes, birthday parties, or just fun team building days are all events that you can share on social media.
Humanising your brand, and attaching a person and an emotion to your social media profile will improve your overall engagement, reach, and loyalty. After all, social media is essentially an open shop window to your business values, culture and people.
White & Case, for example, share all sorts of culture themed events on social media. They have their annual volleyball world cup event, where everyone enjoys a fun competition, bags of laughs, games, and activities. They showcase the everyday individual achievements from members at the firm, whether it’s running a marathon, or baking a cake! Naturally they have informative legal content, with blogs, videos and interviews etc, but they also showcase a brand personality.
Paid Ads & Promotion
One of the best things about social media advertising is the specific targeting you can use to get in front of the right audience. There’s no point targeting everyone, there’s billions of people on social media now, so you’ll just be throwing money away. PPC advertising and social media ads allow you to target specific demographics, accounting for location, age, interests, job role, retargeting etc. This is one of the best ways to bypass those who don’t fit your target audience. You can also repurpose your daily content into ads, aiming to hit different levels of the sales funnel with either top funnel informative content, or bottom funnel targeted conversion material.
If you’re unsure who the best audience might be, you could start with some broader messaging, run a trial, and then fine tune your audience and messaging once you understand the most applicable audience sectors.
Don’t overdo the advertising or promotion though. While paid ads and promotion are important to hitting your KPI’s, constantly seeing ads will discourage your audience. Try and stick to a 70/30 or 80/20 rule, whereby a small percentage of your content is ads/promotion. Adding a little CTA to the end of your video or audio content is of course fine, but over promotion might see a decline in engagement.
Final Thoughts
Your social media strategy needs to be a part of your core digital marketing strategy. Start with a bit of research into some key audiences, key drivers and identify the ‘W’s’ to give you some direction. Once you’ve developed a consistent calendar, try and optimise content on each platform, with lots of media variety to engage your audience as best as possible. Don’t be afraid to show a bit of personality, as long as you remain within your overarching brand personality. Share stories, respond, engage. Finally, don’t write off paid advertising as a part of your social media strategy, with a trial period a great way to identify if it is a scalable, worthwhile lead generation channel.
If you would like any more information about your social media strategy, or have any questions, please contact us here for a free consultation!
