With over 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a powerful tool that lawyers should utilize to boost their law firm’s marketing efforts. However, it’s likely that you never took a “Facebook for lawyers” class in law school. Also, many professionals find the social platform extremely overwhelming. Mastering Facebook advertising, a posting schedule, and what content to post is a complex process, even for lawyers. It’s also important to think about how Facebook will fit into your overall social media marketing strategy.
In today’s post, we’ll focus on ways lawyers can effectively use Facebook—specifically regarding what to post on the platform and how to optimize their law firm’s Facebook page.
Learn more: Is Facebook Advertising Right for Your Law Firm?
What should lawyers post on Facebook?
Lawyers can choose from many content formats and types. They can repost content from other relevant Facebook pages and repurpose content from other formats. However, your social media content must prioritize the following to attract and retain an audience: relevancy, value, and engagement.
With this in mind, let’s dive into the seven ways lawyers can use Facebook more effectively.
1. Repurpose content for Facebook
The easiest way for lawyers to use Facebook is to repurpose marketing content. This content might include blog posts, videos, and podcasts that are relevant to your practice area. For example, if you’re blogging or podcasting, you can promote this content through posts on your law firm’s Facebook page. Additionally, you can repost content from other relevant sources (including other social platforms like Twitter) that are valuable to your audience. These sources include law firms in a similar practice area and reputable news and media sites.
When drafting a Facebook post, write thoughtful, yet concise captions. This way, you have a higher likelihood of cutting through the noise and catching your reader’s attention. Use words that are easy to comprehend, and convey a clear call to action (CTA).
2. Behind-the-scenes at your law firm
Social connections and authentic conversations are crucial parts of social media. In particular, Facebook for lawyers is a great way to create a unique law firm brand personality. Facebook allows you to bring light to the more human and engaging elements of your law firm. By creating a unique law firm brand personality, you will have a higher likelihood of sparking more one-on-one conversations with your audience. You will also help your firm stand out from the competition.
But how should you create a great brand personality for your firm?
Sharing behind-the-scenes snippets of your firm is a perfect way to humanize your business and engage with clients. For example, Clio customer Palace Law shares photos of their office pets—a simple and entertaining tactic that encourages higher audience engagement. You can also share news specific to your firm, like events you’re sponsoring or associations you’re a part of.
3. Legal news and events
As a lawyer, you likely already stay on top of legal news and events, especially if they are related to your practice area. Sharing this information on Facebook is a great way to inform others about the news. You also get the opportunity to comment on how the news affects the legal community and your potential clients. By sharing the latest legal news and events, you can showcase your expertise and provide immense value to your target audience.
4. Incorporate humour
Bringing a sense of humour to your Facebook content is an excellent way to engage with your target audience. Just ensure the type of humour you use is relevant, engaging, fits your law firm brand’s overall messaging, and isn’t offensive.
We recommend establishing humour guidelines at your firm, to ensure you deliver a consistent and appropriate message each time. Additionally, you can pepper these types of posts throughout your posting schedule. This is because posting too much humorous content can take away from your firm’s professionalism and overall image.
When done right, posting humorous, legal-related posts not only humanizes your brand, but also adds an emotional layer to posts—making your firm more memorable.
5. Answers to common client questions
A Facebook study found that 66% of people state being able to send a message to a business made them feel more confident in the brand. While face-to-face and email communication can help your law firm build a better client-centered experience, Facebook for lawyers is an excellent communication tool. Facebook for lawyers is also useful for connecting with potential clients.
As a legal professional, existing and potential clients have likely asked you some common client questions. These common questions may be generic or specific to your practice area. Capitalize on this by creating Facebook posts to answer top legal questions—take this strategy a step further and incorporate visuals to capture the audience’s attention.
6. Maintain brand consistency
Brand consistency is ensuring that all the content your firm publishes, is inline with a similar message, colour palate, letter font, visual style, and a matching tone across all online and offline channels. Content channels include social media, websites, blogs, etc. Having this unified brand messaging helps people recognize your firm’s brand. In addition, potential clients will better understand what you offer and you can connect with your target audience more easily. By maintaining brand consistency, you can ensure you don’t post content with contradictory brand messaging on different channels.
Creating branding guidelines will help your law firm establish clear rules and standards to maintain brand consistency for written and visual materials. These guidelines don’t need to be extensive—here are key items to include:
- Tone and voice: Identify your law firm’s personality as if it were a person. As a law firm, you can adopt a tone and voice that is dependable, approachable, and professional.
- Fonts: Choose a primary and secondary font and stick to them. This will help audiences identify your firm’s brand and increase recognizability.
- Images: Outline the type of stock images and illustrations that your firm will use. For example, an ice cream brand may use bright and colourful pictures, and images of happy people. For your firm, think about your target audience and how they would identify with the images chosen.
- Color palette: Similar to fonts, choose a primary and secondary colour and stick to them.
7. Optimize your law firm’s Facebook page
Maintain a social media calendar
It’s tempting to post content on the fly. But having a proper social media calendar and plan will ensure you aren’t posting off-brand content or scrambling to find content to post. Utilizing a social media calendar helps keep your law firm on track with its social media marketing goals. A content calendar also helps ensure you’re posting content regularly and that your content syncs with existing workflows of law firm staff who work collaboratively to bring your firm’s social media to life.
To build awareness, we recommend creating 2-3 Facebook posts per week. Furthermore, ensure that at least one of these posts is original content—like a blog post, an answer to a common client question, or promoting your firm’s services.
Set goals and track results
This will help keep your firm accountable for your marketing ROI (return on investment) and ensure you are constantly optimizing social media marketing efforts. Additionally, tracking results allows you to identify areas of improvement and which types of Facebook posts your target audience is engaging with the most.
Increase visibility for your law firm’s Facebook page
Posting effectively on Facebook for lawyers is a great way to gain a following from new audiences—but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t leverage your existing clients. To ensure prospective and existing clients can find your social pages easily, add them to your email signatures, website, and printed media. In fact, this is a strategy we use at Clio and highly recommended that your firm implements it too.
Keep essential information updated
It seems basic, but oftentimes, it’s challenging to find essential information on Facebook business pages. The “About” section on Facebook should include: hours of operation, location, website address, social media channels, description of your firm and practice area, and contact information.
Additionally, ensure your Facebook business category is accurate—this will increase your visibility on Facebook.
Appoint a community manager
If you find it difficult to manage Facebook and your legal duties, consider appointing a community manager. You can hire for this role internally or externally. The community manager’s duties include reviewing social media posts, engaging with visitors in the comments, and managing direct Facebook messages. Staying on top of your firm’s social media presence is an important part of providing a client-centred experience.
This person can also be responsible for obtaining positive Facebook reviews, which will boost your firm’s visibility and reputation.
Clio Manage and Clio Grow’s email automation software makes it a breeze for Community Managers to follow up with clients with Facebook review requests.
Build relationships with local businesses
It may not seem worthwhile to build relationships with local businesses, especially if they aren’t legal focused. However, these types of relationships are beneficial to both businesses, as they increase visibility and open the opportunity for online and offline partnerships. Follow, like, comment and share on their posts on a regular basis.
Facebook for lawyers is an important part of your marketing strategy
Facebook marketing for lawyers and running a firm’s social media strategy is challenging. But if you keep in mind the seven effective ways for lawyers to use Facebook, this social media channel can boost your law firm’s brand awareness, reputation, and can help your firm gain new clients.
When using Facebook for lawyers, it’s crucial to ensure the content your firm posts is relevant, engaging, and valuable—all while ensuring brand consistency. By doing so, you’re more likely to engage your target audience and increase your law firm’s business. In addition, you can diversify your posts, share original content, news and events, behind-the-scenes tidbits, and pepper in humorous posts.
If you need help managing the Facebook account for your firm, consider talking to an expert or law firm marketing consultant who can analyze your platform and build an extensive social media strategy.