Using Social Media to Grow your Law Firm

Social media has become the new word of mouth for businesses. It’s one of the best ways to increase awareness about your brand and it’s becoming increasingly popular for law firms to utilize social media. Because of the need for constant professionalism and a long list of ethics that comes with law practices, we’ve put together some tips for attorneys on how to most effectively utilize social media. 

Many firms still don’t utilize these tools out of a concern for breaking rules or because they run a more traditional office and don’t think it’s necessary. But social media is a huge advantage for law firms if they’re willing to try it out. By using these platforms, you are able to market your firm, personally network with other attorneys, and humanize your law firm. Below are a few simple guidelines to get you started:

1. Claim your name across platforms

This is important in order to get and maintain name recognition. It would be difficult to promote your firm if, when someone went to look you up, a completely different business appeared. Creating a social media presence with the name of your company that exactly matches the name on your website creates uniformity that is important for advertising and searchability. Having too many variations of your company’s name can get confusing and hard to promote. Even better is to also promote your logo consistently across social media platforms, assuming you have one. 

2. Pick a Voice

This is important for all businesses, pick a voice to represent your company. The posts need to sound uniform, like they’re coming from one person, whether they are or not. This helps create a persona for your page and posts, that can humanize your business, making potential clients more likely to reach out to you. 

The tone needs to be professional because your clients are looking for an expert, someone to rely on in stressful and important situations. This means they are less likely to contact the lawyer making irrelevant or inappropriate jokes on Twitter than the attorney sharing articles and columns relevant to their practice. 

3. Publish your own content

Creating and maintaining a blog is essential to bringing traffic to your website, and to increase your searchability. When you share a blog from your website, you’re creating multiple highways to your own website. Also, it helps you create and control keywords associated with your site and the content you’re sharing on your social media. By having your own blog, you can promote your areas of practice by making connections to news articles and other popular cultural content.    

4. Keywords

For blog posts, keywords are important for multiple reasons and should be the first thing considered before anything is ever written. Create a list of keywords or phrases that you are considering for your post, then look to see what is both a popular search word/phrase, and what will give you the best chance at having your post appear highest in the search results. There are multiple sites that can help you find this information, such as:

• https://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

• https://app.wordstream.com/fkt/app

Finding the best keywords and phrases can be a bit of a guessing game, and there isn't always concrete answer, but it does give you some perspective and direction. You can always pick some to try and see how they perform, and adjust your strategy later if needed.

5. Don’t give legal advice

This should be obvious, but it is still worth saying. Don’t give legal advice over social media! Not only are you giving away your “product” but, and more importantly, you’re risking violating major ethical rules. It’s not worth it. If you want to offer free consultations to your social media followers- that’s great but, don’t do it on Facebook or Twitter. 

At Engage, our members’ successes are our successes. We are committed to providing resources and tips to help you launch and grow your firm. 

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