Trial Magazine

Establishing your firm’s social media presence, building a following, and engaging followers with quality content requires effort—but this effort will have many benefits, including increased awareness of you and your firm, cost-effective messaging, and a wider reach of your content. Typical law firm social media content includes sharing blog posts and relevant news articles, but it can be more than just words and a link. Consider using all types of multimedia in your social media posts, including videos, imagery, and infographics.

Avoid using social media solely to broadcast self-promotional content. Instead, use it to educate your audience and engage with the public.

What Is Engagement?

Social media engagement occurs when a user interacts with one of your social media accounts. Terminology varies by platform, but generally you can measure engagement using metrics such as likes or reactions, follows, shares, comments, mentions, retweets, clicks, and views or impressions.

Once your firm has a social media presence, you should track and review key performance indicators. Find out who your audience is and how they are interacting with your content. Each social media platform provides free, built-in analytics—use them. For example, you can access Facebook Insights, which provides the number of followers, post likes, post reach (the number of users who saw the post), page views, and follower demographic information. If your law firm uses Facebook Business Manager (a free tool that allows businesses to securely manage their pages, ad accounts, catalogs, and pixels), then you can see even more data over a longer period of time.

“Reactive engagement” occurs when a law firm answers direct messages, responds to comments, or likes or shares incoming mentions. “Proactive engagement” is when your firm makes the first move. For example, if you tweet a link to a local news story about JUUL injuries, a Twitter user may respond to your account (to which you can begin an online or offline conversation) or retweet (to which you can “like” the retweet and thank the user for sharing your content). Proactive engagement might work well in other industries, but law firms cannot engage in unsolicited communications with potential clients in the same way as other businesses. As lawyers, we need to comply with all applicable ethics rules and regulations in the states in which we advertise. In 2018, the American Bar Association revised its model rules to include communications about a lawyer’s services through any media, not just face-to-face.¹

Prepare a formal, written law firm social media policy, and provide this to each employee and vendor to ensure everyone who uses firm social media accounts adheres to ethics requirements and your wishes.² Have written guidelines on when and how your firm’s accounts will interact with messages received directly and when and how content can be posted. Just as with any other advertisement, maintain your law firm’s brand standards (colors, fonts, and logos) on social media.

Increasing Engagement

Tried and true methods of increasing engagement can range from something as simple as incorporating appropriately sized imagery into each social media post to customizing your posts for each platform. To optimize your chances for success, know your target audience and what they are likely to engage with to ensure they see your content.

Platform selection. Research where your target audience spends their time online to find the right channels on which to post. Look at what your competitors are doing: See whom they follow and who follows and engages with them. I suggest you start with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google My Business. If your firm has good video content, consider YouTube or another video-sharing site.

Social media scheduling. If you’re posting when no one is looking, it doesn’t matter how good your content is—no one will see it. Based on your audience’s behavior, find the ideal time to post on each channel to make a bigger impact. Once you start posting, you can measure and adjust your strategy based on audience engagement. For example, if you post a blog on Facebook at 4 p.m. on a Monday and it gets only one “like,” you’ll want to try another time such as midday Wednesday. You also can use a freestanding product such as Hootsuite to schedule your posts in advance or  schedule your posts to activate in the future on some of the native social channels such as Facebook—or you can go in and manually post to each channel.

Use infographics. For example, we created an infographic that boiled down complex insurance law language by depicting a rock climbing wall with various obstacles claimants encounter during the claims process. For maximum impact, crop your infographics, post the right file sizes for each social media channel, and then link back to the full infographic on your website. You can use tools such as Canva and Venngage to create infographics.

Live video. Live video isn’t hard to do from your phone or computer. Facebook Live generates comments at 10 times the rate of recorded videos.³ The easiest way to start is to create a Facebook Live broadcast from your mobile device. This does not require any special equipment, software, or coding—you can broadcast from anywhere with a strong internet connection. A good example of live video content is an “#AMA” video, which stands for “Ask Me Anything,” and lets viewers ask you questions about the type of law you practice.

Links, tags, and hashtags. Include links to your social media channels in all of your marketing materials, both online and offline, to increase your following. If you are referencing people or a company in your post, “tag” them so they are notified of the post and can engage with it, including sharing your content on their platforms.

Hashtags, which are everywhere on social media, help users filter posts on topics that interest them. Although they started on Twitter, many other social networks now use them, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Hashtags are a great way to boost the organic reach of your social media posts for free because they are searchable—and on most social media networks, they’re clickable too. For example, on Twitter, when people click on a hashtag, they see all of the tweets containing the hashtag. Common legal industry hashtags include #LawTwitter, #Law, and #AppellateTwitter.

Groups. Your law firm’s participation in relevant groups on social media channels allows you to share valuable information. Facebook and LinkedIn groups are great places to share content and expand your reach.⁴ Be sure posts are on topic and in line with the group’s rules.

Employee advocacy. Many social media marketing or advertising campaigns are more successful with employee buy-in. Your employees are more likely to be perceived as “people like me” by your clients—employees are on the front lines with clients every day. Celebrate your employees’ professional successes and community involvement on social media, and encourage them to share your posts with their followers, increasing your reach exponentially.

Stacey E. Burke is an attorney and a law firm business consultant based in Houston. She can be reached at stacey@staceyeburke.com. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not constitute an endorsement of any product or service by Trial or AAJ.

Notes

1. See Model Rules of Prof’l Conduct, R. 7.1–7.5 (2018).
2. For more on social media policies, see www.slideshare.net/staceyburke/developing-a-social-media-policy-for-your-business.
3. Facebook Newsroom, Introducing New Ways to Create, Share and Discover Live Video on Facebook (Apr. 6, 2016), https://tinyurl.com/y656xm9l. 
4. I have found value in the local GIRL ATTORNEY Facebook groups (national group is https://www.facebook.com/groups/970554029677880/) and the American Bar Association GPSolo LinkedIn group (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2691620/).