Get In On The Buzz
Social Media for Attorneys
Unless you’ve been hiding in a closet for the last 15 years, you know just how important a visible web presence is to every company today, whether a conglomerate with hundreds of thousands of employees or a one person consultancy.
Attention for Your Website
Not all that many years ago, it was fairly easy to get some web side attention. A well designed website with good, organic content that was updated regularly could bring in visitors. Advertising your web address would bring in even more.
Well, the marketplace has become much more sophisticated. There are many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts now advising clients on how to make their sites more reachable. There are many PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising experts working to draw even more visitors to a site.
With the web as dynamic as it is, just as some of these experts become very expert at getting people to a website, things change. One of those changes in the past few years is Social Media. Now, every day, millions of people visit social media sites.
The Web Continues to Change
The good news for lawyers is that social media sites are perfect places to promote professional firms and businesses. Think of it this way. SEO is somewhat like the Yellow Pages. A person searches for a particular topic in a search engine and they are led to results classified under that topic. PPC is like a cross between a classified ad and the Yellow Page. The person searching is led to SEO results plus they are served an ad for a company that also meets their search needs.
Social Media is like public relations. It is publicity that you can generate yourself or you can hire, now, social media experts. You also should be aware that social media can show negative results for you and your firm. Social media is now so prominent on the web that you need to show up to create positive buzz for yourself and your firm.
How to Generate Social Media Buzz
If you are a small firm, you can do it yourself. If you are a large firm, you can hire an expert. Let’s focus briefly on how to do it yourself.
If you are small, you are constrained by time and knowledge. You need a plan to accommodate those constraints. There are dozens of social media sites. The first part of your plan is to focus on a few. You might want to pick just three to start:
- YouTube
- Pinterest (see the link for lawyers)
If you are small and busy, you can allocate as little as one hour a week to posting to each of these sites.
Action Steps
Create a business page on Facebook yourself or hire someone to do it. Post to it regularly. Post any positive news you have generated and post photos that create a positive image of you and your company.
Create a YouTube account. Use an inexpensive flip camera to create positive videos about you and your firm. Post them to YouTube. These can be cross posted to Facebook.
Create a Pinterest account and cross post your photos there.
You can do all of this is just one hour a week. If you have more time and money, do more.
If you already have a blog, and you should have one on your site to enhance SEO, you can set your blog to repost your blog posts automatically to your Facebook page and to Twitter. Always save yourself time and effort by repurposing any content you create.
Tags: facebook, linkedin, page, pinterest, social media