How Lawyers Can Use Social Media to Engage With the Community

Social media has changed the way professionals communicate with clients on a personal level. This can also be said about lawyers and how they communicate with fellow lawyers, their clients, and the courts. Social media engagement for a lawyer is much more than the number of followers or the number of mentions for a brand. As a legal professional, it’s your duty to make sure you’re marketing in a legal way.

You might find yourself with many brand followers, yet they rarely mention anything about your law practice on their social channels. This is why you need to increase your social media engagement. Social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and blogs provide a fast and cheap way to keep in touch with your clients and prospects, monitor your competition, and keep up with the industry trends.

Increasing Your Social Media Engagement

If you want to engage others, you must also be socially engaging. Here are ways you can use social media tools to engage with the community:

Ask Questions

Try and ask open-ended questions that are relevant to your legal content strategy. By asking these questions, you invite followers and any other person to respond. The responses you get enable you to foster communication between you and your social media network by opening up yourself to personal interaction.

The questions you ask need to give you answers that you can use to improve your social media engagement, or know more about your followers.

Tweet More, Like More, and Share More

Do you tweet or post often? Do you click the “like” button on other peoples content? Are you sharing content? All these actions help promote conversation among your followers. Doing this tells your social following that you are always watching what they post and you have an interest in what they are doing.

Follow and Get Followed

You should follow people, but not just anyone. The people to follow should be socially engaging. What does this mean? Well, you shouldn’t waste your time following people who don’t make any effort to be social with you. Therefore, if you want to increase the number of followers for your firm, you must follow other people.

Double Your Blogging Efforts

Blogging is a social media tool that has gained prominence over the years. Running a blog helps you extent your social reach by providing another platform to communicate with your audience.

One of the features of a successful blog is incorporation of the comment section. Here, you can allow your readers to comment and share your blog’s content.

The best way to make the most out of your blog is to blog regularly. “Regularly” here means that you blog at least once a week or more if you seek to promote social engagement.

Join Professional Online Network Groups

Professionals have come up with various networks to share tips, information and just hang out. Are you a member of any professional networking groups? If not, then you are losing out. You need to join groups that are relevant to your practice areas and interact with other legal professionals in these groups to increase your social engagement.

In Summary

Taking control of your online presence is a necessity, and there are a few ways to take control of this presence than using social media. Used the right way, social media can give you a voice online, and help drive new clients to your page.

The clients will come in term of followers, but you have to keep them engaged for you to retain them and get more followers. Make sure you ask questions, blog more, tweet more, follow more, and join a professional network to succeed.

Header image courtesy of Flickr user Clyde Robinson