How to Create a Social Media Strategy for your Law Firm

In today’s digital age a strong online presence is crucial for any business, and law firms are no exception.  As you know, social media can be an effective (and cost-effective) online tool for smaller firms – allowing them to connect with a wide audience, build brand awareness, and attract new clients.  Social media can help firms better reach potential clients – who need their specific expertise – and it can help strengthen relationships with existing clients by keeping them engaged and informed.  

But simply having social media accounts for your firm isn’t enough.  To really realize the benefits, you’ll need a defined strategy.  

Often small firms can struggle with a somewhat scattered approach to social media.  They try to be on every platform all at once and then they try to create a bunch of different content on different topics all at once.  This confuses potential clients (and can quickly exhaust firms and their teams).  This is why starting with a clear social media strategy is so important.

A well-crafted social media strategy ensures you’re focusing your efforts on the right platforms, creating targeted content that resonates with your ideal client, and staying consistent in your messaging.  This article will guide you through the process of considering – and then creating –  a comprehensive social media strategy, including tips on staying consistent with use of a content calendar.  

This is something that doesn’t have to take a lot of your time.  True, there is a bit of reflection and planning involved – but once that is done your firm will have a framework (customized to your specific needs), so that you can be intentional on social media and move more effectively towards your own online goals.

There are 5 basic steps involved in creating your firm’s own social media strategy.  We discuss each in detail below.

1. Set Clear Social Media Goals for your Law Firm

Your law firm will have set business goals that it wants to accomplish, and your social media strategy should support those goals (or support, at least, some of them).

Step 1 is therefore to look at your broader business goals and then pick one to three goals to set for your firm’s social media.

These might be goals like:

• boost brand awareness 
• drive more traffic to firm website
• generate more inquiries from prospective clients
• increase new client acquisition
• establish thought leadership
• establish authority on a certain legal topic
• foster community engagement
• support law firm recruitment efforts / attract legal talent

When you have your one to three goals, you’ll want to set targets to aim for.  Your target, for example, might be “we want to increase new inquiries by X% in sixty days”.  When your firm sets a specific target like this, you’re providing yourselves something to aim for.  You also have something to assess (whether or not you reach said target). 

So give each of your goals a clear figure and/or date to help you measure and analyze.

2. Identify Your Firm’s Target Audience for Social Media

Your social media content should not necessarily be for “everyone”.  An effective social media strategy needs to focus on specific audiences.  So your firm should think about who it ideally wants to reach.

To start, it can help to think about some basic demographics:

• What’s the age group (approximately) that your ideal client is in?
• Where do they live? Do they live locally? Very near your firm?
• Do your ideal clients speak a specific language? ie. Is your firm looking to serve certain communities within your city or neighbourhood?

Then drill down more, and think further about your ideal audience:

• What goals do they have? What do they need?
• What challenges are they facing?
• How will your social media content help? How could it help?

3. Choose The Right Social Media Platform(s) for your Small Firm

Many law firms try to be everywhere all at once, thinking that’s how they can reach the most people.  However, it’s hard to reach those you want to with this approach.  You might also tire (or overwhelm) yourselves – and your teams –  with this overly broad approach.

Instead, you should identify the best social media platform(s) for your firm, and focus your attention on just these one or two spaces.

To determine the best platform(s) for your firm, ask yourself three questions: 

• Where are your ideal clients? ie. What social media platforms are they on?

• Which platform would best allow you to achieve your business goals? For example, if your firm goal is to increase sales and you want to use targeted ads, maybe Facebook is a good fit for you.  If your goal is to increase brand awareness with short, easy-to-digest, legal content, then maybe Instagram or TikTok will work for your business.

• Which platforms do you have the resources to be on? Different platforms have different features and require different content types and formats.  For example, if you don’t have the time or money to create long-form videos then maybe YouTube is not the way to go.  But do you feel you have resources for short-form content? Graphics? If so, you might consider someplace like Instagram.

Once you’ve thought-through the above, pick your one to two platforms and commit to doing them well!

If you lack confidence (or experience) you may want to do a little more research into social media platforms and ultimately pick just one platform to start with.  Again, whichever one you choose, make sure it is one that: your target audience is active on (see step 2); aligns with your firm’s social media goals (see step 1) and you have the time and resources to cultivate consistently (see step 3).

4. Create a Social Media Content Plan for your Law Firm

As mentioned, creating a bunch of different things at once – and putting them in a lot of different places at once – is rarely effective.  It is not focussed enough to engage or reach the people you want to reach.  Or, it may get you “exposure”, but the wrong kind of exposure (or a kind of exposure that is less ideal than you could achieve with a plan).

Your law firm should have a social media content plan!  This doesn’t need to be long or complicated, but it should take into account these four basics: content pillars, content types, content goals and scheduling.

The 4 Basics of a Small Firm Social Media Content Plan

• Content Pillars – These are the main themes or topics your content focuses on.  Again, you don’t want to create content on everything under the sun.  Even if you have a lot of topics, related to your practice, that you could talk about, it’s important to categorise your content under just a few, clear pillars

You should have three to four defined themes that your firm posts about on its platforms – so that anyone who visits knows what to expect (and what they will get from following you).  For example, a law firm might consider pillars like: legal education (specific to your firm’s practice areas), answering FAQs, case studies (based on cases your firm has recently dealt with) or storytelling more generally.

• Content Types – These are the different formats your content will take.  For example, will your firm use video (long or short), audio (like podcasts), text (like quotes, questions or articles) and/or images (like info-graphics, pictures and photos)? 

• Content Goals – These are the specific objectives you want to achieve with a piece of content.  Your content goals will be somewhat similar to the social media goals we talked about in step 1 (so they will also align with your firm’s overall business goals).  However, they are more specific than the step 1 social media goals.

For example, a content goal for a post would not just be “to increase traffic”, but…

• • To inspire action, ie. comment or fill in a survey
  • To educate / provide value, ie. share content that provides value to your audience (answers a common legal question or solves a problem)
  • To entertain
  • To encourage reader to click onto firm’s website and read more
  • To build trust
  • To showcase A, B or C, ie. something your firm wants to showcase

• Content Calendar and Scheduling – To effectively execute your social media strategy, it’s important to use a content planner of some kind to stay organized and consistent.  With a planner you’ll have a clear schedule so you’ll know what you’ll post, where you’ll post, when you’ll post it and what the goal of the post is.  By scheduling your content in advance, you won’t be grasping for content ideas, or posting in an ad hoc way.  You’ll save time overall and your firm will better meet audience expectations.

Your content planner can be basic and done in Microsoft Word, Excel, Notion, Google Docs or wherever you like to work.

With your preferred form of planner you’ll map out two to four weeks of social media content for your firm (using the information you uncovered in the previous steps).  

For each scheduled social post, the planner should include:

• The Content Pillar the post belongs to
• The Content Type
• The Content Goal
• The Content’s Call-to-Action (Don’t assume that viewers will automatically reach out to you or comment.  Ask them!  Invite them to take a next step, whatever that may be (downloading your digital brochure, visiting your website, reading your full article, calling for a free consultation, etc.))

5. Measure your Law Firm’s Social Media Progress

As with anything online, it is important to track and review your performance over time so you know what is working well and what should be adjusted.

For the purposes of measuring your firm’s social media performance it’s important to keep focussed on the metrics that really matter.

Key Social Media Metrics for Small Law Firms

It’s easy for firms to become focussed on the wrong metrics – metrics like social media followers or likes.  However, these are really vanity metrics.  They may make us feel good but may not help us understand if our social media strategy is working (or not).  A firm is unlikely to know why someone follows its page, and whether or not they will ultimately become a client.

 Much better metrics to focus on are:

• Reach 

This is the number of unique users who see your firm’s content.  For example, you might see that a certain firm post has “Reached” 200 people on Facebook.  While your firm may not have many followers, reviewing your Reach will help you appreciate your true audience size. 

A firm can measure Reach with a social platform’s own analytics tools (ie. Facebook’s analytics tool, for the above example).

• Engagement Rate 

This is the percentage of your audience that interacts with your firm’s content relative to the total number of its followers or impressions.  So if a Facebook post has an Engagement Rate of 8% it means that out of 1000 people Reached, 80 users interacted with the content (ie. the audience size is 1000, but 80 people wanted to go further and interact with the content via shares, likes, saves, comments, etc). 

Engagement Rate is another layer of understanding into how effective your content is.  It gives you an idea of how much interest there is in your content and allows you to reflect on what is working well and what could be improved.  

Again, you can track this easily with the simple analytics features within your various social media platforms.

• Click-Through-Rate 

As the name suggests, the Click-Through-Rate (or CTR) is the percentage of users who click on a link or a call-to-action in your post.  

Measure your CTR with social media analytics and/or Google Analytics (a website plug-in).

• Conversion Rate  

This is the percentage of users that take your desired action after interacting with your content.  That is, it’s an indication of who “completed” the goal you set for your post. ie. Downloaded your information brochure, filled out your contact form, signed up to your webinar, called your firm, etc. 

Google Analytics is a good way to measure Conversion Rates.  It is a free tool.

Analyzing Your Firm’s Social Media Results 

It’s a good idea to, every so often, analyze your social media results next to your larger business goals.  You may want to do this once a month, or once every quarter.

Here are some things to consider during your reviews:

• Which firm posts are performing best?
• Which Calls-To-Action are getting the most clicks?
• How is the firm’s profile performing? (weekly? monthly?)

You’ll then be able to turn your mind to what should be refined.  You can adjust your social media strategy, based on your results, and test again (ie. run and review again).  You might ask yourself:

• Do you need to adjust your content pillars? (see step 4)
• Do you need to change your content type(s)? For example, should your long-form videos be shorter? (see step 4)
• Do you need to increase posting frequency? (see step 4)

Conclusion

Developing and implementing a well-defined social media strategy can benefit any small law firm.  By following the five step strategy map, outlined above, small firms can establish a targeted online presence – one that fosters brand awareness, nurtures online relationships, and aligns with broader business objectives.  And consistently delivering high-quality content, and engaging with your audience on your chosen social media platform(s), will ensure that your firm remains in-step with leading firms in the digital-legal landscape.

Please feel free to send us a message if you have any questions about creating a social media strategy for your law firm.   Would you like some assistance?  We’d be happy to help!