Law Firm Social Media Strategy: Publishing and Monitoring Your Social Media Content

Over our last few posts, we’ve provided insight on how to create the best possible social media strategy for your law firm. You can read our two previous social media strategy pieces here:

Social Media Advice Straight From The ABA

Best Practices For Creating Social Content

After reading the above blog posts you should have a better understanding of how to operate on social media in a professional manner, and best create shared and native content for your social pages. But, unfortunately just putting together quality posts doesn’t guarantee steady post engagement.

In order to really reap the rewards of social media, you’ll need to get into a consistent publishing routine, learn how to track the results of your social posting, and know how to effectively increase your social presence. In this blog post, we’ll go over the best way to accomplish all of this, and help you get your social media pages up and running.

Develop A Publishing Schedule

The best way to build an audience for your social media pages is to make sure you’re sharing quality content on your pages on a near daily basis. But, how many attorneys have the time or desire to go on their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages every morning, and come up with an engaging post on the spot to send out to their followers? The answer is probably very few. Even those highly ambitious attorneys who post frequently on their pages, will have days where they just don’t have time for social media.

This is why it is critical to plan out your social media calendar in advance. Scrambling to come up with something to share every morning is stress you don’t need in your life. Instead, dedicate a few hours on a slower day at the office to planning out your social media posts and be covered for a month.

In a recent blog post, Sprout Social blogger Dominique Jackson agreed that having some sort of social content publishing schedule in place is a must for businesses, even if you do so while leaving room for improvisation later. He said, “A social media calendar builds the framework for what you’re going to share, then you can fill in the gaps by manually sharing posts, responding to incoming messages and engaging with your audience.”

So what are some best practices for developing a quality social content publishing schedule?:

• Post as much as possible, and during days where you have nothing new to share, re-sharing older pieces of content can keep your followers engaged.
• Never let your social pages be idle for too long. Ideally, you should be posting something on your pages at least once a day (on weekdays). At the minimum, you should try and post something two or three times a week, even if it is just sharing a link to something interesting you read over breakfast.
• Your posting schedule should not just include what days content will be posted on, but what times as well. For each social platform there are best times of days to post. For example, studies have shown that posting at 3 p.m. on Facebook will get you the most post likes, while noon hour is a peak posting time for Twitter. For more information on best times to post, check out this HubSpot guide.

Hootsuite will be your best friend when it comes to executing your social media plan. The site allows you to better manage your time and schedule out your posts days and weeks in advance, as well as post content to all your social pages at once. It serves as a significant time saver, and the Hootsuite Pro plan allows you to manage up to 50 social profiles for just $14.99 a month.

Track Your Social Posting

As is the case with anything you sink a great deal of your firm’s money and time into, you’ll want to know if your social media posting is actually improving your business. So how can you tell?

Look Through Your Previous Posts

Often referred to as vanity metrics, tracking things such as “likes”, “favorites”, “shares”, and “retweets”, are one of the most obvious ways to know if your social posting is being well received. If your content is being frequently reshared on to other people’s social pages, you know you’re doing something right. If people are frequently commenting and replying to your posts, that is another good sign, as it shows people care enough about what you have to say to want to talk more about it.

Check In With Your Clients

One of the best ways to learn if your social media efforts are paying off, is to speak directly to your new clients. Everytime a new person calls into your business, take a moment to ask them how they came across your firm. If you hear a lot of people saying they discovered you through social media channels, then your social efforts have been successful. You’ll also want to pay close attention to your firm’s bottom line. Has there been an increase in clients and revenue since you began posting on social media? Engaging on social networks is a lot of work, so you’ll want to make sure you eventually receive a proper return on investment.

Use Free Analytics Tools

If your social media results aren’t so apparent, you’ll need to dig a little deeper. Begin by checking out some of the analytics tools available on the social media networks themselves. We recommend using social tools like Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Analytics to learn more about your audiences’ tendencies and desires, see when people are visiting your pages the most, and learn what types of posts are being best received by your followers.

Free tools like Google Analytics can help give you a more clear picture of how much social media traffic is being driven to your site, and what users are doing on your site once they get there. Learning how to best utilize a program like Google Analytics can take a lot of research and time, so for advanced social media tracking, you may want to consider consulting with a marketing professional. For those that are feeling ambitious enough to try tracking social media through Google Analytics, this guide from Social Media Examiner is a great place to start. The guide will show you how to use Google Analytics to see the impact social media has on your site’s web traffic, and see how visitors of your social media pages consume your content.

Find Ways To Increase Engagement

We would like to urge all of the attorneys reading this to be patient and stay the course with their social media posting efforts, especially in the beginning. But, if after months of trying, your social media plans are consistently falling flat, there are some things you can try.

Utilize Paid Promotions

One of the biggest problems firms deals with on social media is that not enough people are seeing their content. Social media can be a crowded place, and with so many businesses promoting their services on social networks, it can often seems impossible to generate social traffic organically anymore.

Another way to increase engagement is boosting your posts through Facebook and Twitter Ad campaigns. These types of paid promotions can help get your content not just seen more, but seen by an audience that is relevant to you. How much you want to spend is entirely up to you. A good place to start is by boosting posts at $1 a day. This allows you to get a clearer picture of which of your posts are being better received by your social audience. If you see a certain type of post getting a lot of engagement, you can gradually begin putting more money into boosting it, until the number of likes, shares, and comments you receive begins to level off.

Get Help From Friends

Using your real life connections can be another effective way to boost your social presence. Get in touch with friends who promote their businesses on social media, and ask them to give you a shoutout or share something of yours on their social pages. Doing so can be a great way to get the word out about your business to a whole new audience of relevant people. Also, be sure to consult with your colleagues who have done well on social media, and pick their brain a bit.

Final Thoughts

There is absolutely no shame in trying and not failing to get engagement from a social media post. What is unacceptable in today’s age, is not making any effort at all on social media. While it may take time for your firm to get consistent engagement results on social platforms, the potential results you can see from being on social media are just too good to pass up on. With the technology obsessed millennial generation now entering adult age, having a strong social presence is more important than ever when it comes to winning over clients. So go back to the drawing board, get help if you need to, and do whatever it takes to get your social media pages buzzing.