Making the case for social media management for law firms

Why should social media management for law firms be on your immediate to-do list? We live in an age where promoting our services online is essential. We already have websites, which do a lot of that work for us, but our website is a one way street which does not enable us to connect with our audience, have real conversations, and share our knowledge. Social media takes our legal branding to the next level by getting social with our audience and providing them with real insights for their legal needs.

Research shows that 81% of lawyers are already leveraging social media to set themselves apart professionally and 71% of them are acquiring clients through their social media marketing efforts. The right social media management platform can help law firms leverage social media to boost brand awareness and bring in new clients, while protecting their reputation and integrity.

In this article, we’ll explore why your firm needs to be active on social media, the challenges associated with social media management for law firms, and share how using a specialized platform can equip your legal team with the right tools to navigate the complexities of this field.

3 Reasons to bring social media marketing to your law firm

You may think social media is for consumer brands. But nowadays, social media is also a place where experts share their knowledge and connect with their audience, making it a perfect place for lawyers to grow their practices. Here are three key reasons you need to put social media into your firm’s marketing strategy:

1. Having a strong digital footprint is essential for attracting new and existing clients

Prospective clients typically conduct thorough research on law firms before initiating contact. This means, by the time they consider reaching out to a law firm, they have likely investigated your firm, its partners, past cases relevant to their situation, your competitors, and any additional information that could inform their decision. This proves the importance of establishing a robust social media presence for your firm, so you can make a great first impression.

2. Employee advocacy is the best way to position your firm as authorities in your field

The expertise of your lawyers is your most valuable asset in attracting clients, and employee advocacy serves as an unparalleled platform for showcasing this expertise. With employee advocacy, your lawyers can post thought leadership content that showcases their legal knowledge and enables them to build trusting relationships with potential clients. Through these efforts, they assert their authority in their field and reach a broader audience. 

3. Your competitors are already leveraging social media 

The legal industry is highly competitive, with an increasing number of firms leveraging employee advocacy to stand out from the competition. According to recent studies, 84% of law firms are already marketing their practices on social media. Failing to enhance your firm’s visibility on social media could result in losing ground to competitors.

The challenges of initiating a social media program at law firms

If you’re a legal marketer, you know there are many challenges unique to marketing for law firms. There are restrictions on what lawyers can say publicly and how they can advertise their services–and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Some of the most common challenges engaging in social media for law firms include:

Lack of time

Lawyers spend endless hours working on cases, meeting with clients, drafting documents, overseeing contracts, and more. With all their billable hours filled up to the max, it’s difficult to ask them to do even one extra task. A recent Oktopost study found that legal services posted significantly less advocacy content per day than other sectors. This is often attributed to a lack of time and lack of buy-in from lawyers on the importance of employee advocacy. For this reason, in order to ensure adoption of employee advocacy in your law firm, you’ll need to transform advocacy from an extra task to something that is tremendously valuable and can be done with little time investment.

Difficulty convincing partners of the value proposition

Your partners have dedicated themselves to delivering outstanding legal advice, earning a stellar reputation based on their expertise, dedication to service, and the development of trustful client relationships. Moreover, they excel at identifying weaknesses in arguments. Therefore, if you aim to persuade them to embrace social media, you must present an irrefutable case for its adoption by your firm.

Legal protocols

As lawyers, there are many risks that your employees must avoid when using social media which would not be a factor in other fields. They must be cognizant not to:

• Solicit clients
• Mention any information that could identify a specific case they worked on or a client they worked with
• Post any content that could be interpreted as misleading
• Share they are an expert in a particular legal field without proper certification
• Offer any form of payment in exchange for promotion of their legal services

Of course, these are not the sole legal considerations lawyers might need to observe on social media. Nonetheless, they represent some of the most common ones. Depending on the territory where your firm operates, there could be additional or fewer precautions.

Overcome social media challenges with Oktopost 

Yes, there are certainly struggles when it comes to implementing social media marketing for law firms. But we’ve also established that social media marketing is the best way to empower your lawyers to showcase their knowledge and interact with existing and potential clients.

Here’s how the right platform can help make the case for adopting  social media marketing at your firm:

Easy adoption

Lawyers tend to be extremely hard working. And when they’re constantly evaluating contracts, advising clients, researching, and engaging in important cases, convincing them that they should also be posting on social media is no easy feat. That’s why having an employee advocacy platform which makes posting effortless, and easy to fit into their busy schedules is the best way to get your lawyers on board. Here are some handy Oktopost features that enable quick and easy advocacy adoption:

User-friendly advocacy board

Your advocacy board should be highly intuitive, so your lawyers can easily search, discover, and share pre-approved content to their personal social profiles. Most importantly, they should be able to clearly see each piece of content they’re posting and understand what it’s about before they post. This will make even the most skeptical employee advocates feel more comfortable sharing and participating in your advocacy program.

Mobile app

Due to their busy schedules, social sharing when your lawyers are in the office simply may not be feasible. That’s why ideally, you want to let your lawyers share content on the go—directly from their smartphones, making it a convenient experience for everyone.

One-click sharing

The easier it is to share content, the more likely your lawyers are to participate actively in your program. As basic as it might sound, one-click sharing is an extremely valuable feature to look for when choosing an employee advocacy tool. Make it effortless for your employees to publish company content to their profiles, and they will repay you with many shares.

AI scheduling

Another feature that helps meaningfully streamline the user experience for lawyers is scheduling. Let’s be honest, expecting your team to log in and share daily is not realistic, that’s why being able to schedule a week’s or even a month’s worth of content ahead is essential for empowering your lawyers’ advocacy adoption.

Metrics that can prove your case

Your partners may be the world’s best arguers, but even they can’t argue with sheer data. That’s why a social media management and employee advocacy platform that can showcase how your social content is performing and can directly prove the engagement you are receiving is a game changer. Here’s how Oktopost’s robust analytics and reporting capabilities can help:

See which potential clients engaged with you (We call them “Influenced Opportunities”)

For law firms, your social media management platform must provide insights into the impact of social media on acquiring new clients. Calculating Influenced Opportunities with Oktopost tracks which potential clients have engaged with your social media content and whether it facilitated them becoming actual clients. This approach enables you to link social media activities directly to financial outcomes. To  get started with this feature, you need to manage your client database with Salesforce. 

Measure clicks to your website that originated on social media

You will be able to determine whether your social media engagements are creating interest to explore your expertise and services. How many potential clients are clicking through to your website and reaching out to you for further support. The data you will see can be detailed to include the specific network they clicked from, the campaign topic and theme you tagged, and even the specific announcement or content piece you wrote that played a key role in generating the most clicks.

Get a better understanding of your audience

Oktopost’s platform allows you to monitor the growth of your social media followers over time and understand what topics they are engaging with. Such analysis allows you to know what makes your audience tick and assess the topics that matter most to them. With Oktopost, you can learn about the networks that your followers use, see the growth of your audience over time, understand which employees’ social activities are attracting the biggest audience, track followers by country (important for international firms), view followers by industry,  gauge the sentiment of your followers, see who has mentioned your brand, and track popular keywords your followers used when they mentioned your firm.

Track engagement

Creating content that resonates with your audience can be a complex task, especially in the legal field. Therefore, monitoring engagement metrics like clicks, likes, mentions, and shares is fundamental to understanding your audience’s interest levels. These insights are invaluable for refining your social media and employee advocacy strategy, determining the best times to post and which legal challenges interest your audience.

Get a comprehensive overview of advocacy and social media marketing effectiveness

A comprehensive view of your social media performance, combining data from your corporate profile and employee advocacy efforts, is essential. This helps your firm understand how your advocacy efforts compare to your social media marketing efforts, so you can refine the types of content that’s most impactful for each. 

Law firm social media management and governance 

Your social media platform must ensure unapproved content does not make it through the cracks. Therefore, you need to use a platform that identifies users and assigns roles, enables approval workflows, and bans specific terms.  

That’s why Oktopost has implemented the following governance features:

Manage and Control Access 

With this feature, you can ensure that the people on your team have an appropriate level of access to the platform. This way, posting on behalf of the firm is based on their training, knowledge and responsibilities. In the backend, the platform helps you set up specific roles and permissions for each role so you can manage who can share and what they can post.

Approval Workflows

This feature enables you to create custom approval workflows to quickly review and approve social posts before they go live. This way, you can  have several people write posts and schedule them, but no content  will actually get posted before they’re approved by the necessary parties at your firm. Another  simple and smart feature allows you and your team to write comments to each other as they draft posts, so they can  clarify and discuss the content without leaving the Oktopost platform.

Control the Language (We call it “Banned Keywords”)

This feature ensures your team follows professional conduct across social media by restricting prohibited terms. You can upload specific words and terms that you don’t want your writers, editors, and employees to use when posting information about your firm.

Start growing your firm’s reputation on social media

Adopting the appropriate social media management platform is pivotal for law firms aiming to harness the power of social media and employee advocacy to boost their brand presence and attract new clients. By choosing a platform that makes it easy for legal professionals to get onboard while safeguarding their professional reputations, law firms can empower their legal teams and help them build their personal brand. This ensures your law firm is at the forefront of your clients’ minds whenever they need legal counsel.

Learn more about how legal professionals can benefit from being active and involved on social media.