Being a law firm on social media can resemble a Goldilocks situation. You don’t want to be too formal, but you can’t be too casual, either. You don’t want to bore your audience, but you also can’t share every dirty detail of the cases you’re working on. So how does a law firm navigate social media? To help you get the most out of your social media marketing, here are five social media mistakes you should avoid.
Not Engaging Your Audience
At first glance, social media looks to be all about posting content for your audience. But the reality is that that is only half of the work of social media marketing. In fact, if you post and call it a day, you’re making one of the most common social media mistakes: engagement.
Social media isn’t meant to be a monologue or an opportunity for you to lecture your audience with no response. Ideally, social media will allow you to enter into a dialogue with your audience. A law firm that authentically engages its audience builds a stronger brand. That engagement becomes a point of differentiation that helps your law firm stand out.
A law firm that authentically engages its audience builds a stronger brand. That engagement becomes a point of differentiation that helps your law firm stand out.
By engaging with your audience in comments, replies, live streams, and messages, you’re able to hear directly from your clients (and potential clients) about who they are, what they need, and whether or not you’re serving them successfully. This type of information is priceless, so you’re missing out if you’re not doing it.
Being Too Informal
As far as media goes, social media is definitely on the casual side of the spectrum. People use it to share personal stories, memes, and whims, often eschewing grammar and correct spelling. In many ways, this is great, but it can be a pitfall for law firms, who must cultivate authority and a certain degree of formality to remain trustworthy to their clients. So while you may feel tempted to join in on the social media fun with the jokes and puns and memes – and to a certain extent, you should feel free to – just be careful not to err on the side of improper when you do so.
Being Too Bland
That being said, you also want to avoid the pitfall on the other side of the coin: being boring. To many people, the law isn’t the most exciting of realms, with lots of difficult language and jargon to make it inaccessible and, to put it bluntly, uninteresting. As a law firm on social media, it’s up to you to find a way to make your content engaging and interesting to your audience. If you don’t, you can’t expect them to follow you, engage with you, or – frankly – care about you.
Not Understanding Your Audience
…Use your social media accounts to position yourself as a valuable, useful resource for your audience.
On the internet, content is successful if it can meet one criterion: being useful to your audience. Whether it educates, amuses, entertains, or provides a sense of community, social media content will do well if it serves and has a utility to your audience. And in order to create such content, you must know your audience and know them well. You have to understand who they are, what they want, what they need, why they are potentially looking at your social media, and how you can help them.
With that knowledge, you’ll be able to use your social media accounts to position yourself as a valuable, useful resource for your audience. Being that resource serves as intrinsic motivation for them to follow you and engage with you, as well as a reason for them to build positive associations with your brand.
You’re All About You
In a similar vein, it’s essential to avoid the pitfall of making your social media content all about yourself. Sure, that may be how somebody might use a personal Facebook or Instagram account. Still, as a law firm, your social media content should be just as much about your audience as it is about you, if not more skewed toward being about your audience.
The people who follow your law firm only have so much interest in your company, history, founders, staff, employees, and office. What they care about more is themselves. It’s human nature, after all. So to keep up an adequate level of interest and engagement, become others-focused. It will serve you well.