Social Media Marketing for Lawyers Starts with the End in Mind

Every good lawyer starts with the end in mind. We envision the ideal outcome for our client, and then implement the most effective strategies to achieve their goals. The same process works with social media marketing for lawyers.

As both a practicing attorney and social media marketing consultant for lawyers, I’ve learned that we should start by first figuring out what we would like to accomplish with social media marketing. Then, by setting forth a plan of how we are going to use social media to generate new business, we can effectively implement, measure, and adjust our content and engagement strategies to achieve our desired results:

Since every lawyer and law firm is different, our goal should be to develop a social media marketing strategy that plays into our unique strengths, interests, and vision for developing new business. For example, if you enjoy writing articles, blogs, and commentary relating to your practice area, you can utilize social media to drive traffic to your content by posting links to your blog and encourage friends and followers to engage in a discussion through the comments.  If you prefer to network with colleagues in your community and attend events, you can use social media to post photos about your experience thereby demonstrating to your followers that you are a leader in your field.

Once you’ve decided your content strategy, then next steps is to determine what tactics you will use to execute your strategy. One thing to consider is whether you will market from your personal social media profiles or will you create a business account for your law firm? There are certainly advantages and drawbacks to both. For example, your Facebook friends are more likely to interact with your content because they are interested in you and seeing you succeed. On the other hand, posting too much “business” content from your personal page could turn people off, and cause them to unfollow you. For most lawyers, the key is striking the right balance between posting to their personal and business accounts.

Another important tactic to consider is which platforms you will use for social media marketing. Many lawyers who practice personal injury law, family law, immigration law, and estate planning find Facebook to be an effective tool to attract new business since their personal friends and colleagues are prime candidates to become potential clients and referrals sources. Other lawyers who practice complex business litigation, intellectual property, or who represent medium to large companies find LinkedIn to be their preferred method of networking since they are able to easily reach business leaders in their desired field. No one platform is necessarily “better” than another. Rather, certain platforms offer more opportunities to attract new clients depending on your practice area, strategy, and marketing goals.

In the end, social media are simply tools to accomplish a particular objective. The key to social media marketing for lawyers is to learn how to use these tools to accomplish to accomplish YOUR business development goals. We use social media consulting to help you identify your business development goals and then prepare a strategic plan for you that is designed to help you attract new clients and referrals in a manner that complies with the legal advertising ethics rules. Contact us today to learn more about social media marketing for lawyers.