How to Level Up Your Law Firm’s Social Media Strategy for 2023

Social media marketing for law firms has several benefits and has become vastly popular. However, that means there’s more activity and competition than ever before, making it harder for law firms to stand out. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered with best practices to help you improve your strategy. By applying these learnings across your entire social media marketing strategy, you can carve out a presence and achieve better results. 

18 Tactics For Social Media Marketing for Law Firms

1. Practice Social Listening

It’s important to think of social media as a way to have interactive conversations – not just a channel for pushing messaging at people. Use social listening to understand your audience’s sentiments about your firm, your reputation, and their legal challenges in general. You can not only gain insights that will help you to create and promote content, but you can actually join conversations. Engaging in conversations will help you to connect with your audience, get feedback, and adjust your strategies as necessary. You can use social listening tools like HubSpot or Mention to easily monitor interactions, conversations, and audiences on social media.

2. Really Connect with Your Audience Using Personalization

You need to personalize those conversations and interactions. Today’s social media users are more savvy and expect experiences that are tailored to them and their interests. In fact, research shows that individuals are much more likely to do business with law firms that they feel a personal connection with – and personalizing your social media interactions and other communications with users as much as possible is one way to cultivate that feeling of connection. 

So, when you reply to a commenter, do some research on them, and make sure to use their name in the comment or bring up any relevant info you’ve seen about them.

3. Join in on Communities

Within large social networks, smaller communities are increasingly important. Whether it’s Facebook or LinkedIn Groups or Twitter Communities, there are many opportunities for you to connect with like-minded people and companies within your niche.

Look for communities related to your industry on the platforms you’re active on, then start joining and actively participating. You can also start your own groups around your firm to cultivate an audience with shared interests who are motivated to become your brand advocates.

4. Don’t Use Just Any Hashtags- Use the Right Ones.

Your law firm’s social media strategy isn’t complete without a hashtag strategy. These little symbols (#) have become a cornerstone of any successful social strategy. They work on almost every social media platform – Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram specifically – and help you in a number of ways. Hashtags expand your content’s reach and enable you to connect with people who do not follow you directly. However, not all hashtags are created equal. There are going to be many hashtags that aren’t worth your time because they’re oversaturated, have too small of a following, or simply aren’t niche enough for your practice. Conduct hashtag research by inspecting social media groups, your competitors’ pages, posts using hashtags you already know are relevant, and your followers’ accounts to try to figure out which ones are popular with your audience.

Create a comprehensive list of these hashtags and try to use a mix of hashtags in each post that’s relevant to the topic, your audience, and has a mix of both large following hashtags and niche hashtags. 

Stay up to date on hashtag conventions for each platform as well:

• 3 on LinkedIn/ Facebook
• 2 on Twitter
• As many as you’d like on Instagram (but make sure they’re hidden in the caption or comments so it doesn’t overwhelm your caption)

In order to make the most of hashtags, follow these best practices: 

1. Select the most relevant hashtags for each post, instead of using a fixed set of hashtags for all of your content.
2. Select hashtags with different follower counts (not just the most popular ones). 
3. Don’t use too many hashtags. On LinkedIn, the magic number is 3.

5. Partner with Influencers/ Industry Leaders.

Influencer marketing and social media make a powerful combination. Credible influencers in your field can significantly expand your reach and introduce you to new audiences. Just a few posts from the right influencer can have a large impact on your firm’s reputation and can help you gain followers. The trick is to find the right influencer that aligns with your brand but also has credibility with people in your target market. We suggest using a tool like Influence.co when you’re just starting out. You can use this platform to find influencers by category, location, or follower count. Make sure to vet them properly and only work with those who can move the needle for your firm. Another option when you find an influencer you’d like to connect with is to invite them on your podcast or webinar.

Although there’s not many influencers in the legal industry, you can also partner with relevant thought leaders in your industry. If you notice someone is active on social media, form a connection, engage with them, and discuss how you can collaborate.

6. Ensure Your Social Media Strategy has a Good Mix of Content Types

Social media offers so many options when it comes to content. From traditional posts to videos, live streams, carousel posts, IGTV and Stories, there’s a lot to experiment with. Make sure your strategy allows room for trying lots of content variations. Different types of content work better for different purposes, on different platforms, and for different audiences. Map out a content strategy where you use each content type a few times, and then make note of what you’re learning about what works best. 

Remember: most algorithms on social media favor features that are specific to them. Of course, a basic text post is always appreciated, but you should also try to create different types of posts regularly in order to mix it up.

Here’s some ideas of content types for each platform:

• Facebook: Reels, videos, multiple photo posts, stories
• Instagram: Reels, videos, carousel posts, stories, interactive polls, quizzes 
• LinkedIn: document posts, newsletters, videos, multiple photo posts, polls, event posts
• Twitter: videos/ GIFs, polls, threads, retweeted tweets/ quote tweets

7. Track and Measure Your Social Media Performance

In order to improve your law firm’s social strategy over time, you need to constantly take stock of what’s working and what’s not. It’s essential to track and measure your social media performance over time. You can use a third-party social media analytics tool or the built-in analytics feature of each of your social media platforms. Some marketers even use UTM tracking links to get more detailed insights into their social media traffic and exactly how much traffic is coming from which initiative. To create these, you can use a code generator like Google URL Builder. 

Related: Law Firm Social Media Strategy: The Ultimate Checklist

8. Establish an Optimized Schedule

Advanced social media marketers will plan out their content in advanced based on research, trends, and an analysis of last month’s metrics. Use a social media content calendar to plan out each month. And don’t forget to schedule your posts at the most optimal times! Not all posting times are created equal: each platform’s posts will perform best at different times.

 9. Leverage Social Media Software

As we mentioned, it’s helpful to have a tool where you can schedule your posts in advance. A comprehensive tool like HubSpot’s Marketing Software will allow you to schedule posts in advance across platforms, look at social media analytics, view recent mentions on social media, and allows for many features that’ll make life easier like an automatic link shortener, the ability to duplicate posts, or ability to view the best times to post.

10. Use Ads As Part of your Social Media Strategy 

Most social media platforms have their own advertising capabilities. We recommend LinkedIn most for law firms, but each platform has its own advantages. Ads are a great way to generate leads, build brand awareness, and improve the ROI of social media marketing for law firms.

Related: The Law Firm Guide to LinkedIn Advertising eBook

11. Optimize Your Bios for Search

Keywords aren’t just something that’s relevant to blog posts online. You can also use relevant keywords in your social media bios in order to help your page get found on Google and in the search results for each social media platform. So, for example, when creating your Instagram bio put something like ‘Rhode Island Personal Injury Lawyer’ in your tagline, so when users search that phrase on Insta, you’re likely to pop up.

12. Run a Following Campaign

You can leverage giveaways or other campaigns in order to help boost your following. Just post a relevant offer and explain that users must do something like follow your social media pages + comment/ like your post in order to enter. This is a great way to build up your following organically.

13. Conduct a Social Media Strategy Audit

Social media audits are a great way to help ensure your social media strategy is actually working. You can have an agency conduct one, or follow this guide.

14. Explore New Platforms

New platforms emerge all the time, one of the most popular right now being TikTok. You may think exploring these new and young platforms is a waste of time. However, the content you make for this app can easily be repurposed. For example, TikToks can be repurposed as Reels on Instagram or Facebook.

15. Use Consistent Branding

You’ll want a cohesive look across all your platforms that matches the branding on your site. Carefully curate header images and profile pictures that match your branding and are sized correctly for each platform. Try creating a brand style guide as well that includes font, tone of voice, colors, etc. This will help you ensure that every image, video, and caption fits your brand.

16. Leverage Live

Many platforms offer the ability to ‘go live’- such as Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter. You can use these live videos as a time to host a Q&A, share behind the scenes footage of an event, etc.

17. Remain Non-promotional

This may sound confusing- isn’t the end goal of social media marketing for law firms to promote yourself? Nowadays, users are sick of advertisements and suffer from digital fatigue. They don’t want to be bombarded with heavily promotional content. Instead, share content that’s educational in nature. It’ll still generate brand awareness, position your firm as an expert, and generate leads.

18. Step Away From Stock Images

Sure, stock images are amazing, but they’re not all they have cracked up to be. Relying too heavily on stock images for social media is the difference between a beginner and an advanced user. You can still leverage stock images, but rather, find ways to make the image unique by adding branded elements to it like a logo, border, title, etc. You can easily do this using a free tool like Canva. And consider creating unique images on Canva as well to mix it up.

Takeaway

Being intentional with social media marketing for law firms is important to your firm’s overall marketing strategy – and in order to be intentional, you should start with a thorough plan. Make sure your plan includes each of the elements included in this post. Using established best practices across each social platform will help you to achieve your overall goals. 

Do you need help driving real business results through social media? Our social media offerings can be customized to your law firm’s needs and realities. In addition to social media management, we offer social media consulting and training for our clients. Contact us today for a free consultation.

This post has been edited and republished from Aug. 25, 2021.