Social Media Marketing for Lawyers: Planning Your Content

Whether or not social media marketing for lawyers will be successful comes down to content. If you spend a ton of money on advertising, but have crappy content, you won’t attract new clients. If you have a zillion followers, but crummy content, you won’t attract clients. If you know someone marketing wizard who can promise you the world, but your content stinks, you won’t attract new clients. In other words, quality content is king – so let’s discuss some best practices for planning your content creation.

One major key to generate quality content is to add value by answering the answers the questions your target audience may already have or not know how to put into words yet. This will demonstrate your experience and help others solve a problem. How could you put this into practice for your law firm? Consider this:

Let’s say that you practice family law and have developed a reputation for being a thoughtful and caring advocate. You have a passion for helping people through their divorce and find that you tend to attract most of your business through friends, family and personal referrals. In this situation, your law firm social media marketing strategy may be to engage your friends, family and colleagues through your personal Facebook profile. In this case, you’ll need to curate educational content about how the divorce process works and demonstrate your expertise to your personal network.

You can accomplish this by creating short videos where you answer commonly asked questions from people are considering a divorce. These videos could be as simple as “What Should You Consider Before Getting a Divorce?” or “How Does the Divorce Process Work in Los Angeles?” These videos will provide the foundation to create quality social media posts.

Once you’ve captured these videos and photos, your next step is to create social media posts that educate your personal network about your skills and experience in family law. You can start by posting your video content once a week and include a link back to your website so that your friends can learn more how you can help them with a divorce. You could share the photos of you speaking at family law events to demonstrate that you have strong reputation for helping others in your community. By doing so, your friends and colleagues will know that you are someone they can trust when they need an attorney to assist them with the family law process.

Let’s instead say you practice intellectual property law and enjoy helping small business owners and corporate executives protect their intangible assets. Your law firm social media marketing strategy may instead focus on leveraging your blog content on LinkedIn. Your content strategy may be to write four blog posts a month on how to protect your business through copyrights, trademarks and patents so that you can share these updates with your professional connections on LinkedIn and draw them back to your website. To execute this strategy, you’ll need to develop consistent blog content and pair it with professional photography in your LinkedIn posts.

Once you’ve created this content, you can start by scheduling one LinkedIn post each week. The post would feature a short teaser of your blog content that entices people to learn more, such as, “What is the biggest mistake business owners make about trademark law?” You then pair this caption with a professional photo that will attract attention – such as you consulting with someone in your office. Pairing your blog with a photo will increase the chance that your connections will read your post. You can then include a link back to your website so that people who are interested in learning about trademark law can read the remainder of your blog.

You can share this content with your LinkedIn connections each week and post your blog in a LinkedIn Group consisting of corporate executives in your area. Doing so will educate your professional network on how to protect their business and drive more traffic to your website from your ideal clients. In this way, you’ll become a trusted advisor in your professional network and earn more business over time. Over the years, I’ve found this to be a successful recipe for social media marketing for lawyers.  

While these are just two examples of how content can be leveraged to accomplish your marketing objectives, they underscore the importance of following your social media plan to determine the type of content you want to develop. Need some help? That’s where I come in. I can help you create a law firm social media marketing plan that fits your firms strengths and speaks to its ideal clients.