Wondering what are the social media marketing basics for law firms?
You are considering whether or not you should focus on social media marketing for your law firm?
What is social media marketing for law firms?
You asked the questions!
We’ve got the answers…
In this article, we will provide you with the social media marketing basics you need to better define your law firm’s strategy. We will look at what is social media marketing, creating brand awareness, the benefits of social media marketing, what should be your law firm’s strategy, the type of content you should produce and so on.
We have divided this article into the following sections so you can navigate to the section most relevant to you:
- What is social media marketing?
- What is the possible reach with social media marketing?
- What are the benefits of social media marketing?
- Social media marketing strategy
- Social media content publishing
- Social media listening and engagement
- Social media advertising
- Social media metrics
- Takeaways
What is social media marketing?
The first item in social media marketing basics for law firms we need to cover is what is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of creating digital marketing material and assets to promote your business, products and services on social medial platforms.
Your ultimate goal with social media marketing is to increase your site traffic, brand awareness and sales.
With social media marketing, you are engaging with your clients and prospects where they are.
You engage with them in their own social interaction space.
A business engaging with people on social media can connect with its targeted audience in a more personal and engaging way.
Interacting with social media users is referred to as social media engagement.
Engagement can be things like writing comments, giving you likes, sharing your content, re-posting of material and so on.
There are many social media platforms out there.
Each social media platform is unique, will have different types of user interactions and will require a different social media marketing strategy.
Depending on the social media platform you’ll leverage to promote your products and services, your digital marketing content may be different.
Your approach may also be different.
Law firms stand to benefit from social media marketing as they can see what people are saying about their brand, what are people talking about and what are they looking for.
You can then define how you can positively interact with them to achieve the best brand awareness and growth.
What is the possible reach with social media marketing?
Social media marketing can give your law firm a massive market reach.
There are literally billions of people on different social media platforms.
According to HubSpot, they break it down as follows:
- Facebook: 2.2 billion users
- Twitter: 335 million users
- Instagram: 1 billion users
- LinkedIn: 645 million users
- Youtube: 1.9 billion users
- Snapchat: 300 million users
- Pinterest: 250 million users
As you can see, each of the above social media platform provides you with a possible reach to hundreds of millions of people, if not billions.
Your law firm could tap into that!
What are the benefits of social media marketing?
Social media marketing can provide your law firm with many benefits in getting your name out there and driving additional sales.
Brand awareness
One important factor in social media marketing is that you can get your name out there.
We refer to this as brand awareness.
Considering the hundreds of millions of people potentially on each of the major social media platforms, if not billions, by reaching out to social media users, you can help them get to know you better.
Listen, there are 3.2 billion social media users in the world.
Your law firm should find a way to get in people’s daily social interactions and positively impact them.
The more you interact with people and give them things they like to see or read about, the more they will act as a catalyst in sharing your content.
You can get hundreds and thousands of people acting as your law firm promoters!
With brand awareness and reach, people will know you exist and will sort of know the type of legal services you offer.
This will lead to many reaching out to you through social media or by visiting your website.
They will discuss the content you share and potentially ask you about your legal services.
You’ll end up with additional traffic to your website.
Additional leads
With more additional traffic to your website, you will have the possibility of converting leads into paying customers.
With social media marketing, you will create digital marketing material and content catering to the social media users.
You want to find a way to promote your services through social media engagement.
You want to promote your law firm in such a way that you reach your target audience, capture their attention, reach them personally, drive them to your website and convert them to a customer.
Different companies use different strategies to generate leads and promote their content such as:
- Creating contests
- Putting out offers available on your website
- Hosting videos
- Sales through social media profiles
For your law firm, you’ll need to see what works for you.
Typically, brand awareness is the best strategy for law firms.
Your goal is to use social media marketing platforms to drive traffic to your website and from there you use your website to ultimately convert the traffic to a paying customer.
Depending on your jurisdiction, your law society may or may not prohibit you from doing contests or offering promotions for instance.
You’ll need to ensure your social marketing strategy is going to be consistent with your law society requirements.
Another very useful way for law firms to generate social media momentum is to host videos breaking down complicated legal topics.
Your lawyers can get out there, answer user questions and create a level of trust with the audience.
Law firms can generate a good amount of traffic and leads.
Customer relationships
Social media marketing is all about building relationships.
An effective social media marketing campaign should be designed to reach out to your target audience, engage with them and build a relationship.
For example, if your law firm is targeting small to medium-sized businesses offering them labour law legal services, you’ll want to provide your users with content on social media where you get them to interact with you on labour-related topics.
If your target audience asks you questions, write comments, gives you likes, you should make sure you respond to that.
Your engagement should not necessarily be about labour law but about labour in general.
It can be entertaining, it can be fun, it can be informative.
Whatever that resonates with your audience.
You want to show your audience that you are present.
You want to show that your law firm is not a faceless organization after people’s money.
You’ll want to show your target audience that you write content to help them, that you are there to respond to their comments and thank them for giving you likes.
When your target audience sees engagement on your side, they’ll be more inclined to deal with your law firm in case they need labour-related legal services.
Competitive analysis
An important social media marketing basics for law firms to discuss is getting competitive analysis through social media.
Social media platforms can be used to promote your law firm but to also keep up with what your competitors are doing.
Remember, at the end of the day, everyone is doing social media marketing.
Your competitors are doing it as well.
Your competitors are also trying to interact with your target base.
You should monitor your competitors’ interactions and see what seems to be working and what is not.
If your competitor has issued digital content resulting in thousands of shares and likes, you’ll want to know what that is and why was it share so much.
Based on data and intelligence you gather on social media platforms, you should make sure that your own social media marketing strategy is equivalent at the least and better than your competitors’.
Social media marketing strategy
To start your social media marketing, you’ll want to define your strategy.
Define your goals
Ask yourself what is it that you are trying to achieve going on social media platforms.
For law firms, brand awareness is a great strategy.
Your strategy could be to increase traffic to your website, to increase your conversions, to have users register as subscribers, to convert them into paying customers or just build a community around your brand.
Define your goals so you can then prepare a solid plan of action.
Target the social media platform
Once you’ve defined your goals, you’ll need to target the right social media platform.
There are several social media platforms to choose from and each of them provides access to different type of users.
Here is a quick overview of the type of audience you can reach out to using different social media platforms:
- Facebook: B2C reaching Generation X and Millenials
- Twitter: B2B and B2C reaching Millennials
- Instagram: B2C reading Millennials
- LinkedIn: B2B reaching Baby boomers, Generation X and Millennials
- Youtube: B2C reaching Millennials and Generation Z
- Snapchat: B2C reaching Generation Z
- Pinterest: B2C reaching Baby boomers and Millenials
This should give you an indication of which social media platform you would like to focus on.
If your law firm is looking to target businesses, then you’re better off going on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.
If you want to target individuals, you can do Facebook for instance.
It’s important that you decide how many platforms you want to engage in and ensure you can manage all of the platforms actively.
Type of content to share
The other social media marketing basics for law firms is to define what type of content you will want to create and share on social media.
Who are you targeting?
What do they want to read?
What will they share?
What’s trending now?
Typically, you’ll want to define your ideal customer persona and write content targeting that persona.
If your law firm writes on Twitter, naturally the type of content you’ll write will be very different than if you are sharing articles on LinkedIn.
Create a type of content that is both suitable for the social media platform and pleases your audience.
Social media content publishing
For an effective social media marketing strategy, you’ll need to make sure that you publish content regularly.
You must have an active social media presence.
The more active you are on social media, the more you produce and share content, the more you’ll be successful at building brand awareness.
Producing content should not be difficult or to extensive, it could be simple articles, images, reposting of something interesting.
What’s important is that you show your social media community around your brand that you are active and engaged.
Social media listening and engagement
Another social media marketing basics for law firms is to ensure that you listen to what people are saying out there and engaging with them.
Building a social media profile and marketing around your brand means that you want to create user engagement.
User engagement is how people interact with your law firm, share your material and engage with you.
People can do that directly with you but can also write comments and share things with others without you knowing about it.
The more you have a strong social media presence, the more people are going to write about you on different platforms.
This makes it important for your law firm to listen to what is being said out there and make sure you engage with people.
If people are writing positive comments about you, you can write something back to them that will surprise them.
If people are saying something negative about you, you can see how you can help them find a solution to their problem.
What’s important is that you listen to what is going on out there and try to engage with people avoiding the spread of rumours and content that you do not endorse.
You can use social media listening tools to achieve this.
These tools will aggregate all your social media platforms and messages so you can have a holistic view of what’s going on out there.
Social media advertising
Your social media marketing strategy can also include social media advertising.
This means that you will pay the social media platforms to promote your content and material.
With the right social media advertising strategy, you can reach a wider audience and expand your user base.
The advantage of social media advertising is that you can target your audience quite well.
You can target by region, demographics, interests, behaviour and so on.
With the right social media advertising content, targeted at the right person, at the right time, you can make really good returns on your investment.
Considering law firms may generally look to create brand awareness, the return on investment calculation will be different.
If your goal is to increase your user base, then the social media advertising budget you will spend will not give you an immediate return on investment but with a larger user base, you’ll increase your chances of making money in the long run.
Social media metrics
To make sure you are on the right track with your social media marketing, you will need to analyse your performance.
That’s social media marketing basics for law firms you must ensure you master.
Analysing your social media marketing results will help you determine if your efforts are producing the intended results or not.
If they are, great!
If they are not, then you must understand why and shift your strategy or tweak things around.
As you progress in your social media marketing journey, you want to make sure you are on the right track.
Tracking, analysing and understanding your social media metrics is therefore fundamental to your overall success.
Here are some of metrics you can track:
- Engagement
- Reach
- Followers
- Impressions
- Video views
- Mentions
- Tags
- Reposts
- Shares
There are a variety of ways you can track your social media marketing metrics.
You can do that with tools like Twitter Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Instagram Insights or using social media scheduling tools with built-in monitoring and tracking features.
You should also make sure you use Google Analytics if you are tracking your social media marketing efforts along with your website visits and traffic.
Takeaways
There you have it, social media marketing basics for law firms.
In this article, we talked about what is social media marketing and how you can create brand awareness and market reach for your law firm.
Using social media marketing can produce great results for your law firm.
You can engage with your audience, build a community around your brand, increase traffic to your website and ultimately generate more sales.
Social media marketing requires effort to be constantly present and engaged with your audience.
By doing that, you will boost your law firm’s profitability as you build an audience.
We hope you enjoyed this article.
Is there anything you’d like to share with us on social media marketing basics for law firms? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment.
