20 Advanced Facebook Tips for Lawyers
The number of law firm pages on Facebook has grown tremendously as more firms embrace the potential of this social platform. For those in the legal profession who aren’t active on social networks, here’s one word of advice—join. These advanced Facebook tips for lawyers can be highly effective at the following:
Driving traffic to your website
Heightening brand awareness
Connecting with users across the globe
Take a look at these 20 advanced Facebook tips for lawyers to learn the best practices.
Advanced Facebook Tips for Lawyers
By not promoting your firm on social media platforms, you’re not only doing a great disservice to yourself but also the clients who crave online engagement and connection. We live in an increasingly interconnected world. With the swipe of a finger you can communicate with someone thousands of miles away and this sense of accessibility is the perfect breeding place to foster trust among customers.
In this post, we’ll cover advanced Facebook tips for lawyers. These best practices can be implemented immediately to expand your following, highlight your firm’s expertise, and connect with clients. As you likely already guessed, Facebook is the top social networking site with just over 1 billion users. If you can learn to maximize these Facebook tips for lawyers, you should have no trouble replicating your efforts on other popular channels.
1. Claim Your Law Firm’s Vanity URL
One of the first Facebook tips for lawyers is to claim your vanity URL. Not many people realize it but you can actually customize your web address on Facebook. It’s relatively simple to do. Just choose a username which is suggested by Facebook or one that you come up with yourself. If you’ve already selected one, you also have the option to modify it (assuming you’re specified as admin). The purpose of customizing your web address is to make it easier for individuals to identify your firm using the search function. It will also be visible in search rankings.
2. Test Engagement Levels Over Different Times
If your firm is posting updates on Facebook at random times of the day it’s a bit like throwing darts at a target, blindfolded. One of the keystones of effective social media work and #2 on our list of Facebook tips for lawyers is to be strategic. While social media is usually treated casually, there is a science to seeing results and it involves testing. Make it a point to schedule updates during different points of the day and analyze the level of engagement they receive. Publishing pressing news at 5pm on a Friday likely won’t get the same attention as earlier in the day since people are typically preparing to leave work at that time. Some data has suggested that posts between 1pm-4pm result in the highest click-throughs and the worst times weekdays before 8am and after 8pm. Again, other factors play a role including the location of your target audience. Using an application like Buffer can be useful for scheduling posts well ahead of time.
3. Add a Call-to-Action Button on Your Profile
A call-to-action button, is essentially one that prompts the reader to engage with your firm. It could be a button that say’s “like us”, “get free updates”, “sign up for our newsletter” or “subscribe to our news feed”. The bottom line is that it needs to stand out from the page and captivate the reader’s attention before they exit the page altogether.
4. Facebook Advertising Campaigns
A great feature about Facebook’s PPC advertising is that it allows your to select your target “demographic” based on specific age, education, personal interests, and location. For example, an immigration law firm would be able to select men/women between the ages of 18-55, and include keywords like:
Immigration to the United States
Citizenship
Permanent Residence
Green Card
Be conscious to not be overly aggressive with these ads because you can put off some users if your law firm seems spammy. On another note, Facebook advertising rules restrict ads from having more than 20% text. So be sure to play it safe by keeping text to a minimum.
5. Highlight Accomplishments or Milestones
Has your law firm receiving an award or achieved a milestone? Highlight it on your Facebook page. You can add details including the date, images, links to external pages, and more. Some of our Facebook tips for lawyers may be considered no-brainers but law firm’s still neglect to do them.
6. Include Facebook Links in Client Correspondence
In an effort to gain more Facebook followers it can be effective to include links to your social media profiles on client correspondence and in monthly newsletters. This isn’t one of the most advanced Facebook tips for lawyers, but often it gets forgotten.
7. Add Videos to Increase Engagement
Number 7 on our list of Facebook tips for lawyers are to add videos! Videos get a substantially higher engagement rate than articles with only text. As of this year, Facebook users are posting 75% more videos than only one year prior. What does this indicate? Well visual content is more popular than ever and stands to be the dominant new-feed content moving forward.
8. Make Use of Hashtags When Possible
The hashtag phenomenon has never been as rampant as it currently is. Although it had it’s birth and subsequent surge on Twitter, Facebook now allows users to include hashtags in posts. Your firm can make effective use out of these metadata tags. Let’s say you’re firm is posting an update on Obama’s Regulation Reform. Slap a #immigration at the end to make your posts more searchable.
“A business should use hashtags if they are used correctly. It’s completely pointless adding loads of hashtags for the sake of it or adding hashtags that no one is going to monitor or care about.”–Ian Cleary, Razor Social
Hashtag Tips
Tools like Hashtagify.me can help you identify which hashtags are trending or popular
Don’t go overboard; one to two hashtags typically suffice
Do a bit of preliminary research to determine which topics are relevant
Check out this guide for more hashtag tips.
9. Pin a Post Every 7 Days
Another interesting feature not too many businesses make us of is the ‘Pin to Top’ feature. Since it often goes overlooked, we consider it one of the key Facebook tips for lawyers. What this does is anchor posts you choose to the top of your timeline. Depending on the frequency of your posts, it’s a good strategy to highlight important news and prevent it from getting buried under less newsworthy posts.
10. Hide Posts or Star Posts
Every now and again you may see spammy or derogatory comments posted on your Facebook page. The beauty of Facebook’s hide function is it allows you to declutter all he junk which could distract visitors from your page. Conversely, you can star others to make them more eye-catching. We’re halfway through the list of Facebook tips for lawyers. The following ten are more data centric.
11. Take the Time to Analyze Insights
Facebook metrics are useful for measuring the impact of your marketing campaign onsite. One important factor to pay attention to is the level of engagement your posts get from fans. By taking note of which posts receive the most hits, you can better tailor your content to appeal to them. To export the data collected, go to the Admin Panel and select “Export Data”. From there, you can select either .xls or .csv format depending on your preference. Now, you’ll see quite a bit of information once the file opens. The important sections to highlight are:
- Page Consumption: The number of people who viewed, downloaded or consumed content presented.
- Reach: How large is the audience pool?
- Engagement: Which posts are generating the most hype? In other words analyze the content that receives the greatest attention and engagement. It’ll give you a clearer indication of what content your audience is receptive to.
- New Likes: Indicates the total number of people who like your page.
These are just a handful of points to keep an eye on.
12. Utilize Crowd-Sourcing for Input
Crowd-sourcing can be an effective way to measure group consensus. Moreover, Facebook is an excellent channel for gaining insights, asking questions and more. Simply throw out a question or ask for input regarding a topic and see the engagement follow.
13. Select Targeting
Facebook recently implemented a new feature which allows you to target your fans by interest.The benefit of doing this is that you can increase the likelihood of fan engagement if you target audiences with a known preference in these categories.
14. Upload Email Lists
Chances are you already have a sizeable email list built up from past clients. Well make good use of these relationships by uploading them to Facebook. If you use a third party service like Mailchimp you can also connect directly from there to save time.
15. Use Facebook to Share Testimonials
Clients often like to post their satisfaction with an attorney by writing a testimonial and Facebook is a great place for them to do it. It not only builds your firm’s credibility and reputation but allows others to see your client satisfaction ratings.
16. Optimize Your Images and Videos
Images and videos on social media sites are known to get exceptionally more traffic than those without. You do, however, need to optimize your images for maximum sharability. A few tips include selecting ones that are vivid in color, the ideal Facebook dimensions and assigned the proper tags.
17. Measure Your ROI
The return on your investment or the ‘lift’ generated by your Facebook efforts can be measured by tracking the number of leads that are driven from Facebook. Tracking these conversion rates gives you a better understanding of your social media performance. Some factors to also take into consideration include the number of likes your receiving and engagement levels.
18. Log Out Remotely
Say you forgot to sign out of your firm’s Facebook account while in the office. Facebook allows you to logout of your account with the click of a button. You’ll also be able to see when your last active sessions were and in which city.
19. Optimize the About Us Section
Your profile’s About Us page is the quintessential place to include a call-to-action button—whether it be a link to subscribe to your law firm’s newsletter, contact us, or visit your website directly.
20. Add Google Map to Your Page
The last of the Facebook tips for lawyers we’ll discuss is adding Google Maps to your profile for added convenience. There are a number of apps you can authorize to add this feature to your profile. It’s a great benefit to propective clients who may not be familiar with your location.
Keep these 20 Facebook tips for lawyers in mind when creating your social marketing campaign. Can you think of any other Facebook strategies? Let us know in the comments section.
