When trying to promote your law firm, getting involved with social media is generally a good idea. You can develop relationships with your followers or friends, and you can get the word out about the services that you offer. While using social media can be a good strategy overall, it does open you up to some problems. Here are some of the biggest social media mistakes that lawyers make.
Not Setting Up a Social Media Policy
If you are running a law firm, not having a social media policy in place is probably a mistake. In most cases, your employees are going to use social media in one way or another. If you do not give them an idea of what you expect from them on the social networks, they could give your firm a bad name. Set forth some expectations for your employees on how they should be using social media and how they shouldn’t.
Not Responding
It is very common for law firms to have official Facebook and Twitter pages in today’s society. While many law firms have pages, they don’t all use them like they should. If you receive messages or tweets from other users, do your best to respond to them. When you don’t respond to messages or comments about your law firm, you run the risk of turning people away. If you seem approachable and easy to talk to, people will be drawn to that. There is a general perception of lawyers as being unapproachable and that they are too important to deal with other people. If you will respond to people on social media sites, this helps change this perception.
Promoting Yourself Too Much
Although there’s nothing wrong with occasionally promoting your law services on social media networks, it is a mistake to do it all the time. If you are continuously bombarding your followers and friends with marketing messages, they will eventually be turned off. Many of them will delete you or stop following you because of it. When you post on social networks, try to include some interesting content that people will actually appreciate. This will go a long way toward separating you from the back of the other law firms out there.
Not Monitoring Keywords
When you use social media effectively, you can monitor conversations that are going on about things in your niche. For example, you could set up a custom search that shows anyone in your area who is talking about “law” or “lawyers.” This way, you could see what other people are saying and possibly jump into the discussion to offer some help.
Not Using it for Recruiting
Social media can be a great tool when it comes to hurting new blood to your law firm. If you are looking for someone to come into the firm, don’t overlook using social media to get the job done. For example, using sites like LinkedIn can give you access to some pretty good recruiting tools. You can look at the resumes of users and talk to people without actively recruiting them. Once you find someone that you like, you can bump the recruiting efforts up a little bit.
Posting About Clients
Some lawyers actually make the mistake of posting information about clients without getting their consent. Most of what you do with clients is privileged information and should not be shared with the world via social media. Avoid posting any information cases or clients on your social media profiles.
If you’ll take the time to get to know social media sites, they can pay big dividends for your firm. Just make sure you avoid some of these mistakes.
Andrew Handley works on social media marketing for Samuelson Hause & Samuelson, blogging and interacting with interested followers daily!