The Balance Between Paid and Organic Social Media for Law Firms

Social media is the biggest and best method to interact with people both far and near. Whether you are a single attorney running your own private law practice or a marketer at a large law firm, you need Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to reach your target audience. Social media content is divided into two categories, paid and organic. You can choose just one and stick to it, but most experts recommend using both paid and organic content to get the most out of social media marketing.

What Is Organic Social Content?

Organic social content refers to posts that have been manually published by a person to any given account. It can also refer to content posted through social media tools such as Hootsuite, wherein a person can manually schedule posts to be released to different social media accounts. Organic content will typically only be seen by your actual followers on whatever platform you post on.

Unlike paid social content, organic content does not require you to pay money. Instead, you exert human effort to try to reach as many people as possible. Growing you followers can be tedious and offers slow results. It can take months of continuous work to gain followers. Organic content normally does a good job of reaching your real target audience, but it doesn’t reach large numbers of people.

What Is Paid Social Content?

Paid social content means just that: these are posts that you have paid for in order to reach a wider audience. An example would be the sponsored ads you see on Facebook and LinkedIn. When you pay to promote your content, you have the assurance that your posts will reach a large number of potential clients. They will go far beyond the actual followers you have on any given account.

When Should You Use Paid Social Content?

Paid social content is perfect for law firms and organizations who are looking to gain more followers and expand their reach. There’s no point in posting organic content when you don’t have enough followers to begin with. Paid content can help you spread awareness of your brand. Paid social content is also perfect for informing people about upcoming events, like seminars or anything else your firm might be involved with or sponsoring. The big social platforms all have options that will allow to tailor who will see your content. This means you can create target audiences that include your ideal client, filtered by age, location, and even profession in order to generate the right leads for your law firm.

When Should You Use Organic Social Content?

If you want to interact with your followers, doing it through organic social content is the way to go. You don’t have to spend money to share content with people who are already following you. Plus, organic content and real interactions with your audience will give you natural feedback This will then provide you with ideas about what your audience loves and hates. You can then use this data to make your large-scale advertising campaigns more efficient and effective.

Using Both Paid and Organic Content

Using both kinds of content is important for law firms to get the most out of social media. Finding a balance between the two will help you avoid spending so too much money on paid content or time on organic content.

Although it may be easier to pay for sponsored ads than to update your social media accounts manually, organic content also has benefits that paid content does not offer, such as direct client engagement that fosters genuine interaction between your brand and your audience.

Strategies per Platform

Regardless of the type of content you post, each platform requires a different strategy. It is important to post content that is relevant to the platform. This is to ensure that your content effectively achieves its purpose and that your effort and your money don’t go to waste.

It helps to look at the type of audience that uses each platform. For example, people on Facebook typically use it to watch videos, look at photos, and read articles. Because people go on Facebook for entertainment, this is a good place to share your photos and videos from events or causes that your firm supports.

Twitter, on the other hand, has a character limit, so it is best used for links and quick information. If your content is image-based, Instagram is a great platform to start with. It is also appropriate for short videos.

Both paid and organic social media for law firms are important. You just have to know what is worth paying for and what is worth the manual effort. To make sure that your effort doesn’t go to waste, it’s also important to study what kind of content should be shared on each platform. Social media has plenty of power to help your law firm. You just need to have the right balance.