Social Media for Lawyers: 3 Easy Ways to Engage
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the necessity of implementing social media marketing as it relates to your overall legal marketing strategy.
In fact, most online gurus talk about social media marketing as though it’s the end-all, be-all to all to your legal marketing plan!
Unfortunately, most of those web 2.0 marketing “gurus” have never set foot in a law firm and don’t understand just how crazy your schedule really is!
Fortunately, there are still a few ways to engage (and be effective) in social media marketing without being “inauthentic” or non-transparent to your target market (which is a very bad situation to be in if you get caught!).
These are just a few strategies that I’ve found to be really helpful for lawyers that can’t devote too much time social networking. I encourage you to pick and choose what works for you and just jump in as soon as possible!
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Outsource SOME of your social media marketing- This is a really great idea for the lawyer that just doesn’t have time to engage, but really wants to. If you’re using twitter as your main social media source, have someone on the team pre-write tweets of events, links to blog posts or other things going on at the firm that you can approve. Then ask them to schedule the tweets in a Twitter client like Hootsuite or Tweetlater to go off randomly during the week. Then when you actually have time to engage, you can just focus on talking to people and won’t have to worry about getting your marketing out. You can also follow the same strategy for posting updates on Facebook if that’s your network of choice.
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Encourage your team to start networking– This is the scariest option for most lawyers, but it can be quite effective if you set things up right! You’ll need to lay down some guidelines, but it can be done. For example, you may want to have your team open a corporate twitter or facebook account separate from that of their personal account. It’s also a good idea to have them setup branded user names around the firm (for example, the people at Dell Computers use names like @JoeatDell or @MaryatDell just to show it’s a corporate account). You’ll also want to make it clear that they can’t give legal advice! While their goal is to engage and make strategic relationships, they’ll need to direct people to a blog post or to an attorney if someone has a legal question. Other than that, let them loose and have them engage throughout the day. It will make work fun for them and increase your sphere of influence at the same time!
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Outsource ALL of your social media marketing– While some people really look down on this approach, it can be effective if done the right way and for the right reasons. If you are absolutely intimidated by social media—or just aren’t the social type, this might be a good route for you. You’ll definitely want to find someone that has a background in the legal industry and will use social networking to promote and engage on behalf of YOUR FIRM, not on behalf of you. That should be the understanding right from the beginning. You don’t want someone pretending to be you, the attorney (and I hope you can see why that’s a bad idea for a number of reasons). Instead this person or company will be part of the “team” and will essentially be doing your marketing as though they work in-house. If you have further questions about this or need someone qualified to handle your social media, feel free to email help@tremendous-arm.flywheelsites.com for further assistance.
But as you can see from the tips above, all that matters is that you get involved. And fortunately there are so many ways to do it that even you, a busy attorney, have no reason to stay behind in the dark ages of legal marketing 1.0. So pick a strategy and get started with social media marketing ASAP!
Would you like to talk about how we can help you save time on your marketing and help you turn ideas into action? Simply schedule a time on my calendar for a no-strings virtual cup of coffee.