Social media marketing is a killer strategy for a number of industries—and law is just one of them. If you’re looking for ways to grow your law firm, increase brand awareness, and interact with your audience, social media is the perfect outlet.
Throughout this article, we’ll introduce the concept of social media marketing for lawyers, the benefits of this strategy, as well as how to build your own social media strategy for your law firm.
Let’s get started.
Your Guide to Social Media Marketing for Lawyers:
What is Social Media Marketing for Lawyers?
Social media marketing is the practice of marketing your business using social media platforms. In this specific instance, it’s the practice of marketing your law firm on social media.
Social media for lawyers includes things like:
- Creating professional accounts on social media
- Linking to your website from your social media profiles (and vice versa)
- Interacting with your followers and target audience
- Creating content to reach potential clients
One of the biggest deterrents to hiring a law firm is the lack of an online presence, so ensuring you’re online and easy to find will be a great way to appeal to a larger client base.
Source: statista.com
Benefits of Social Media for Lawyers
Other than needing an online presence for the sake of client interest, what other benefits can social media have for a law firm? Let’s cover five major pros to creating a social media marketing strategy.
Get More Clients
Marketing on social media can give you a lot more visibility for your brand, resulting in an uptick in new client inquiries. If you’re looking to grow your law firm, social media marketing can be the perfect strategy to help you do that.
Engage With Your Local Community
Law firms tend to focus on local clients, so being able to interact with people in your local community is also great for brand awareness. It can help people feel better about your law firm and become more interested in working with you if the need should arise.
Build Awareness and Credibility
Make sure more people in your target audience know that your law firm exists. Social media is amazing for brand awareness, helping you grow a following and stay top of mind. But more than that, if you create valuable content, you’ll increase your credibility and make you their go-to person for legal advice.
Keep an Eye on Competitors
Social media can also help you keep an eye on your competitors. Take a look at what they’re doing on their own social media profiles, new people they’re hiring, services they’re offering, and more. Review not only the content they share, but also the responses they receive, and the frequency of their posts can offer valuable clues about what works and what doesn’t in the law industry.
Offer Social Media Customer Service
Help customers out on social media. By responding to comments and messages, you’re able to create another avenue for client support—of course, only by answering basic questions, and nothing that should be confidential.
How to Build Your Law Firm’s Social Media Strategy
Now that you know how important social media marketing can be for a lawyer, let’s talk strategy. Follow these seven steps to build your own social media marketing strategy.
1. Pinpoint Your Goals
The first step in every strategy or plan—your business plan, advertising strategy, etc.—is always to determine your overarching goals. What are you hoping to achieve through social media?
Common social media marketing goals include:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build an online community
- Drive traffic to your website
- Generate new client leads
- Offer social media customer service
- Discover more about your audience
- Share basic legal advice and education
- Recruit new team members
- Grow your business and revenue
You can have multiple goals as well, but the rest of your strategy—including the platforms you choose and the content you create—will be built around those goals.
2. Choose the Right Platforms
Next, decide which platforms you want to use for your marketing. Common platforms used by lawyers and law firms include:
- X/Twitter
- TikTok
- YouTube
Let’s walk through a few examples of how each of these platforms can be used as they each have vastly different purposes and content types.
Facebook is a great platform for all sorts of content. You should set up your Facebook Page with all of the pertinent information about your business, then consistently keep it updated with links from your site, photos and graphics, videos, and other interesting information relating to your law firm.
Law firms can share content on Facebook like:
- Testimonials (see example above)
- Links to blog content
- Service offerings
- Photos from around the office/community
- Infographics
- Videos
Instagram is a much more visual platform, so you’ll only want to keep a presence here if you have the ability to consistently take photos or create graphics you can add to your feed.
The types of content you’ll want to share on Instagram include:
- Graphics/infographics
- Short-form videos (Reels)
- Photos
- Instagram stories
X/Twitter
Car seat safety guidelines: What parents should know about installation, buckling up and more - ABC News - https://t.co/ldkDNKlpRk via @ABC
— Frankel Law Firm (@FrankelLawFirm) January 17, 2019
X, formerly known as Twitter, has long been known for its short-form tweets. Though premium users can now share longer posts than the traditional 280 characters, many users still stick to the shorter-form content.
Share content on X/Twitter like:
- News articles related to your type of law
- Links to blog content
- Service offerings
- Photos
- Graphics
- Videos
- Testimonials
- Short-form text-only posts
LinkedIn is a more corporate platform, perfect for B2B law firms. However, those representing individuals can still see success on this network.
LinkedIn is the perfect platform for content like:
- Graphics
- Links to blog content
- Company updates
- Job postings
- Photos
- Long-form text-only posts
- Service offerings
TikTok
@lawbymike Illegal To Keep Money You Find?! #finderskeepers #law #lawyer #lostandfound ♬ original sound - Law By Mike
TikTok is a much less serious social media platform. Only use it if you’re capable of creating short-form, humorous content. Law is a more serious profession, but you can still have some fun with your social media content, as you see in the example above.
Share content on TikTok like:
- Short, funny videos
- Photo carousels
- Educational videos
- Skits
YouTube
Whereas TikTok is the platform for short-form, non-serious content, YouTube is the opposite. Here, you’d want to share longer form, more serious, more informative content, like in the example above.
Share video content like:
- Educational videos
- Service offerings
- Explainer videos
- Promotional videos
Once you settle on the platforms you want to use, create your accounts, then optimize them with the same handle/account name (matching your law firm’s name), a profile photo (of your logo), and a bio that explains exactly what your firm does and the types of clients you represent.
3. Build Out a Content Plan
The next step is to build out your law firm’s content plan. You’ve seen the types of content you need to create for each platform. Now is the time to choose which types make the most sense for your type of law as well as your team.
For example, due to the nature of these firms, criminal defense law likely has less educational content than a law firm that works on wills and estates or a firm that helps with worker’s compensation or personal injuries. So a criminal defense lawyer might focus on short-form content whereas the others might choose long-form content.
There are plenty of other nuances to keep in mind though.
Essentially, in this step, you’ll want to write a list of the different types of content you plan to create. This could look like:
- Infographics
- Blog content
- Long-form videos
- Long-form text posts
- Promotional content
In this step, you’ll also want to decide how often to post on each of your platforms. Best practices dictate:
- Facebook: 2 posts/day
- Instagram: 1-2 posts/day
- X/Twitter: 3 posts/day
- LinkedIn: 1 post/weekday
- TikTok: 5 videos/day
- YouTube: 1-2 videos/week
Create a content calendar where you list out your content ideas for the entire week or month.
4. Create Your Social Media Content
Now, it’s time to start creating your social media content. If you’re brand new to social media marketing, you might want to create a few ideas before you even start creating your content calendar.
Otherwise, start putting together your social media post ideas. Each post will, at the bare minimum, need a compelling caption. Most posts will also need some kind of media to accompany your caption, like a photo, graphic, video, or link.
You may want to batch your social media content process, meaning you plan a whole week or month of content, then you create all of that content, then you schedule it out.
Gather any tools you might need for content creation. That could include tools for:
- Photo editing
- Graphic design
- Video editing
- Hashtag research
Then put together your posts and start publishing on your new social media profiles.
5. Interact With Your Audience
Once you’ve started building up your social media profiles and posting your content, you need to engage with other users on each platform you use. Be sure to interact with as many accounts that follow you as you can—but you also want to search for other accounts in your target audience and interact with their content in hopes they find your profile and decide to follow (and eventually hire) you.
Ways to do this include:
- Respond to all comments and messages you and your posts receive
- Like and comment on other posts from your target audience
- Find influencers or content creators in the law industry and interact with their content
- Share content from news sources or content creators in your industry
Keeping up an engaged online presence helps your social media profiles get in front of even more users.
6. Promote Your Content
The next step of the strategy is to start putting ad dollars behind your content. Some platforms enable you to promote or boost existing posts. Others allow you to create separate ads that can be used to both boost brand awareness and increase social media followers as well as promote your services in an effort to generate new leads and clients.
Organic social media can only get you so far. Every social media strategy can benefit from the incorporation of paid ads as well. Decide what kind of ad budget you’re comfortable using each month and allocate it across your best performing social media platforms.
7. Analyze Your Performance
Finally, analyze your performance. Each of the social media platforms we recommend using for lawyers have their own built-in analytics—but you can also employ the help of a third-party social media analytics tool that can provide you with all your insights in a single dashboard.
Looking at your social media analytics can help you discover important information like:
- When to post on each platform
- The types of content your audience likes best
- Your top-performing social media platforms
- How many leads and conversions you’re bringing in
You can then use this information to adapt your strategy. Create more content your audience loves. Spend less time on a platform that isn’t working. Make necessary changes to ensure success.
Get Started With Social Media Marketing for Lawyers Today
Ready to start marketing your law firm on social media? Build your strategy, create your social media profiles, and start publishing your marketing content. Take a look at our social media trends for 2024 to make sure you stay ahead of your competitors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can lawyers advertise on social media?
Yes! While lawyers do have ethical issues to be aware of, advertising on social media is not unethical. Feel free to put together a social media advertising strategy on any platform of your choice.
What is the best social media platform for law firms?
While the best social media platform can depend on your goals and the type of content you want to create, Facebook tends to be the top performer for law content. B2B law firms can also get a lot of business from LinkedIn.
Do lawyers need social media marketing?
Yes, every business needs social media marketing—including lawyers and their law firms. Make yourself accessible online, create content that builds your authority, and start raking in new client leads.
