Why You Need Social Media as Part of Your Law Firm’s Marketing Strategy

August 2017

Does your law firm have a social media presence? If not, you need to drop everything you are doing and start building one. Being active on networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus is vital—not just as a means of communicating with potential clients in the 21st century, but also to improve your firm’s search engine visibility.

Related: Social Media Ads: Why They Work

In fact, SEO might be the top reason to have a social media presence for your law firm. The more websites you have, the easier you are to find. This statement is particularly the case with regards to Google Plus since Google will often make sure those pages appear in search results. Having more pages gives you a greater chance of controlling the Google results for your firm, which improves branding and trust.

So, does that mean you can just make social media profiles for your firm, but that you don’t have to maintain them? Nope. To get the full SEO benefit of social media, you need to be consistently backlinking to your website—sharing articles, blogs, FAQs, videos, case studies, and other content. These social shares will not only increase the visibility of your SEO content, but it will also create a larger backlink portfolio for your site, which will only help it in the rankings.

Even divorced from the power of SEO, having an active web presence for your law firm is essential. If your social pages end up at or near the top of Google rankings, alongside your website, there is a chance that searchers will click on your Facebook page or LinkedIn profile before visiting your actual homepage. Active pages are more likely to engage visitors, encourage contact, and drive conversions. Dormant pages lack authority and might even cause a potential client to wonder if your firm still exists.

Having a place online to communicate with customers in a slightly less formal manner is also just good for business. Encourage followers to ask you any legal questions they might have on social media, or even to schedule consultations via Facebook message. This approachability and accessibility will put you in touch with more people because it’s so much easier for the average person to communicate via social media than to call a phone number or send an email.

The questions you get on Facebook or Twitter can even feed back into your SEO strategy, helping you generate new content ideas based on the information that prospective clients want to know. You can then share the content on social media to generate further discussion and inspire additional questions.

Not that your firm’s content is the only thing you should post about on social media. On the contrary, you can also share interesting articles from other lawyers or firms, post about relevant news in the legal industry (or in your particular niche), and aggregate the latest stories of interest in a way that’s digestible for your followers. This kind of activity will help establish you as a knowledgeable source in your industry, which will only lead more clients to enquire about your services.