Law Firm Social Media Strategy: Best Practices For Creating Social Content

So your law office finally ventured into the world of social networking. You’ve determined which platforms you want to join, setup your accounts, and spread the word to everyone that your firm has gone social. So now what?

Well you won’t get much engagement on your social pages if you don’t have high value content to share on them. Having quality content is what will help your social media accounts gain visibility, and get people coming back to your social pages for more.

Content is somewhat of a hard term to define these days, as a lot of things fall under it. Blog posts, videos, podcasts, photo galleries, and infographics are some of the most common types of content you’ll see a firm create.

Related: What types of content can you generate for your firm, without breaking the bank? Click here to find out.

When it comes to social media, content usually falls into two different categories. Shared content and native content.

Shared content is content that already exists on another web page, that you link to on your social pages.

• Ex: Sharing a link on your social media page to a piece posted on your company’s blog site.

Native content is written and/or visual content uploaded directly to a specific social media platform.

• Ex: Posting a company update on your Facebook page, and uploading a picture of your office to go with it.

Including both of these types of content is key to creating engaging and diverse looking social media pages. In this blog post, we’ll go over best practices for generating shared and native content, and later discuss who you can get to help you create content for social media.

Create Shareable Content

When writing a post on your firm’s blog site or creating a video for your firm’s YouTube page, you should always be thinking about how it will be received on your social media channels. Why? Because social media is the best place to get the word out about the content you’ve created.

Related: Learn here why social media is the ultimate engagement tool!

What types of content draw the most attention on social media?

Relevant Content: If you can share a piece of content that relates to something currently going on in the world, people are more likely to care about it. If there is a significant news story taking place that relates to your legal field, create and share a piece of content that is related to it.

Content With Value: Ideally your audience should walk away from every piece of your content feeling like they’ve gained something. The more your content is able to inform, teach, or entertain the online viewer, the more likely they are to keep coming back for more.

Visual Content: People don’t typically have a very high attention span when scrolling through social media feeds. In order to reach today’s online audiences, you’ll need to find a way to catch their eye, and one of the best ways to do that is through images. For example, if you are sharing a blog post, try attaching a relevant picture to it in the post. According to Buzzsumo, Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. If possible, try to avoid using just any old image you find on the internet for your posts. Instead, take advantage of stock photo websites to help your posts really stand out. If you need help finding free stock photo sites, check out this list from Hootsuite. In cases where you have no choice but to use a photo that’s not from a stock photo site, be sure to give the original source a creator credit.

High Quality Content: There are a lot of sources of information on social media these days, and it can be difficult for online viewers to know who to trust. If the content you share looks sloppy, is riddled with grammatical mistakes, or presents inaccurate information, you will not be taken seriously as a source of legal information. Sharing low quality content also will reflect poorly on your firm, and hurt you chances of winning over client. I mean, who wants to hire an attorney who can’t even spell?

Sharing content on social media will not only make your social pages more entertaining, but can be a great way to draw more traffic to your website and other pages on the web. Drawing more traffic to these places, and giving your content more opportunity to be shared can help increase your firm’s online popularity and SEO power. While getting eyeballs to your social media pages is important, you’ll still want to make sure they reach your firm website as much as possible, as this is where the majority of client conversions will happen.

Introduce Native Content To Your Social Pages

Shared content will probably make up a good portion of your early social posting, but as you gradually get more and more comfortable posting on social media, you should begin branching out to native posting. Native content can serve as a valuable addition to any social marketing strategy, as it helps your firm reach viewers that might normally pass your firm by. Data shows that there are many social viewers who do not want to be bothered with waiting for a link to load or being redirected to another page, and will be much more likely to engage with content that already exists right in front of them on their page.

According to the Hallam Blog, “users are more likely to consume your content if they don’t have to click away from the social app – referral traffic to publishers from Facebook fell in 2015, but user interaction on Facebook increased by almost 3x.”

So what are some ways you can attract social media viewers with native posts?

• Make posts in which you seek out audience interaction. Ask your followers questions, or have people on social media share their thoughts on a certain subject. Then respond to what your social followers have to say, and get a real conversation with them rolling. You never know what this can lead to.
• Try posting all different kinds of images directly to your social pages as a way to draw attention to your firm. Did your office have a holiday party? Share somes picture of you and the staff to give viewers a behind the scenes look at what is happening inside your office. Have interesting statistics to share? Try presenting it in an infographic.
• Experiment with uploading videos directly to your social channels. Videos will look more natural on your social pages when you do so. Also, when you share videos natively on Facebook, they are much more likely to be seen.

Native content won’t always garner high engagement results, but we encourage you to continually experiment with different kinds of native posts. The more creative you can be, the more likely you are to really strike a cord with your audience.

Get Content Development Help

You want everything your firm produces to be the best it can possibly be. So if content creation isn’t really your thing, or if practicing law keeps you from having enough time to develop quality content on your own, it’s time to get help. There are plenty of freelance content creation professionals out there looking for work. Diving into that pool of workers can be an efficient and cost-effective way to reach all of your content creation goals and get your social media pages booming.

So where can I find freelance workers?

Websites like Fiverr, and Upwork can be highly useful for putting you in contact with top content development professionals. Many of the workers you find on these sites will be able to help elevate your content to a more professional level and best advise you on how to get it seen. To use the sites, you just simply post the assignment you want done, and you’ll be matched with a list of relevant freelance professionals.

How can I utilize a freelance worker?

In many regards, a freelance worker is like just another member of your staff, except you’ll be getting them at a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee. Tell them exactly you want accomplished, give them a deadline for when you would like the assigned task completed by, and oversee the process to ensure that the work they do is the best it can possibly be. Remember, even though the freelancer is the one authoring the work, the content they create will have your firm’s name on it and appear on your social media channels. That is why it is important you remain in constant communication with the freelancer you hire. The knowledge you have about not only your firm, but your field of law, can add significant value to a piece of content, that a freelancer would likely not be able to generate on their own. Researching a topic is great, but nothing beats having actual experience with a subject.

How do I get the most out of my freelancers?

Simply put, building long-term relationships should be the goal. Think of it this way. When you hire a new employee, their initial work is likely to be subpar, because they don’t know much about your firm. But, as they spend more and more time working for your company, and gain a better understanding of what you expect from them as an employee, there work will get better and better. It’s the same thing with freelance workers. You need to find freelance professionals you can trust, and begin using them on a consistent basis. In most cases if a freelancer is creating content about a company they know little about, it will show. Give the freelancers you hire a chance to learn as much about your business as they can, and be sure to communicate with them during the content creation process as much as possible.

Getting into the habit of uploading high quality shared and native content to your social media pages is great practice, but it may not immediately bring you the engagement results that you seek. If you fail to gain any traction with your initial social media posting efforts, do not panic! In our next blog post, we’ll cover what to do after you hit the publish button, and making adjustments to your social media plans.