Why Enchanting Lawyers Should Be Using Facebook More

To many lawyers with years of experience behind them, the whole idea of advertising might still seem strange. However, in the age of the Internet, we found that the use of tools offered on social networking sites further showcased our experience and knowledge — and another outlet for potential clients to know who we are.
If you don’t have a social networking site, you could be missing out on great opportunities and limiting yourself compared to your colleagues. A Facebook page alone offers several ways to attract attention and boost your credibility among current and potential clients.

Opportunity is Knocking

Brand yourself as an expert. You have the power to create, control and aggregate content that could make you the “go-to expert” for advice on a specific area. Brand yourself as the one to contact for advice in your specialty area. Share current articles but make sure the content is relevant and engaging to your community. For example, our team posts regularly about services within our wheelhouse including facts, case studies, and even client success stories that relate to the world of immigration law. This not only builds credibility, but is a strong foundation of inbound marketing, vitally important to SEO (Google search).

Relationship Building; Through Facebook and other social media outlets you can connect on a more “social” level with your audience helping to build trust. In our office, we respond to new fans through a personal direct message thanking them for joining our page, this is an opportunity to engage them and learn more about our audience.

Clients and potential Clients can communicate directly through Facebook to reach you. Add a message button to your Facebook business page and instantly you can receive messages and be alerted when a new message is posted. Suddenly, you have created a direct link between your firm and potential clients. When we added a message button to our San Diego immigration page the flood gates opened with opportunities of questions and potential new clients.

Facebook membership is 1 billion strong and growing daily. It is mind-boggling the power your firm can attain with a strong Facebook presence. To add a message button: Open the Facebook Business Pages and select Edit and Manage Permissions; then check the Message button.

See what your competition is doing. Many law firms in the U.S. and Canada use social media on some level. Compare your page with theirs and then optimize your own. Don’t let your law practice fall behind by staying within the bounds of traditional word-of-mouth advertising. Those days are past.

Create a venue. Our team regularly seeks out our connections and invites them to join our page. Think of Facebook as your own digital company brochure with benefits, serving as a place where customers can easily reach out to you in a less formal way. The new Graph Search promises to change the way businesses can be found. The advantage for your law practice is that your fans friends will now be able to see their relationship with your firm; think of it as the online version of word of mouth marketing.

Reach out through groups, allowing conversations online, a type of question-and-answer session prior to direct contact. This type of interaction will quickly narrow down the clients to those who are seeking advice in a particular specialization, such as criminal, immigration, estate planning or divorce law. Through this means, the information about you or your firm can quickly be shared among other friends or users. Suddenly, your client list is growing by leaps and bounds.
Build SEO value. By creating a custom URL you have added organic search engine optimization to your business. For example: https://www.facebook.com/myimmigrationlawyer

More Facebook Uses

Other useful functions include embedding your firm’s website address, or a video that puts a face with a name and allows customers to really hear about your practice. This will help increase followers and is cheaper than any other form of advertising. We share where to connect with us on all of our social media channels, website, blog, email campaigns… anywhere we connect with our audience we let them know where to find us.

You can also use Facebook to post regular blogs about completed case topics and how well you represented someone else. This can be done without compromising identities, and it will encourage potential clients to go to your website from your Facebook page where they directly arrange a consultation. We regularly curate added value content about immigration laws, local and national political reform and beyond. This material is great for repurposing across not only Facebook but all of our social outlets.

Be consistent. Steer the course for your social media campaign you will see results. Carve time out daily to reach your fans. No time? Assign a trusted resource within your office or consider hiring and outside Social Media Manager that specializes in law to help curate and manage your community.
Make a commitment to your Facebook marketing and watch your community and engagement thrive. In the beginning, it was a challenge for us to find time but as our fan base and engagement grew (we are over 70,000 fans!), we knew we were on to something! To ease the burden of becoming overwhelmed we created a content calendar for easier organization and commit time aside daily to check and communicate with our fans.

Keeping up with modern-day marketing techniques is no different for a law firm than any other business. Using Facebook as an inbound marketing tool can help capture clients that you could otherwise be missing. There are probably millions of Facebook users in close proximity to you already. Enlist your share of them as clients. Opportunity is knocking, why wait?