Social Network Marketing:
Counterintuitive Advice for Attorneys
By Robert Algeri, Founder
December 2009
As an internet marketing veteran, I’m inherently skeptical. I’ve seen too many marketing “innovations” that turned out to be nothing more than flashes in the pan. So when social networking started to get so much attention, my guard was up. Could it really offer any value?
To answer this question, I performed an exhaustive evaluation of social networking’s viability as a marketing tool. After examining it from every angle, I came to a clear conclusion: it works. I’ll even go a step farther: if executed correctly, social media is an ideal marketing tool for attorneys and other professional service providers.
That said, the trick is doing it right. And we’ve discovered that most social media “gurus” are sending attorneys down the wrong path.
The counterintuitive truth
If you want to develop business using social media, don’t waste your time being social. Connecting with old colleagues and exchanging pleasantries is nice, but will get you only so far. So, how can attorneys use social media to attract new clients? The answer: Online Reputation-Building.
Online reputation-building
Online reputation-building is about establishing yourself as “the” expert in a particular niche of the law. Reputation-building is a proven marketing technique — and social media is proving itself to be an inexpensive and powerful tool that can help.
In order to understand how social media fits in, one must understand the three tenets of online reputation-building:
- Create High-Quality Content
You need to demonstrate to the world that you know more about your area of the law than anybody else does. This means regularly writing cutting-edge “thought leadership” content about the issues facing your area of specialization – and making that content available to the world for free. The goal here is to educate people (and in the process, prove your expertise), not give them a hard sell. Types of thought-leadership content include articles, blog entries, case studies and presentations, among others.
Generating this thought leadership should take up the majority of the time you dedicate to your online initiatives. We recommend using the bio page of your firm’s website as a central access point for all of this thought-leadership content. - Take a Niche Approach
This is very important. Reputation-building works much better if you focus all of your efforts on a clearly defined niche of the law. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to create a reputation as the “go-to” expert in a wide field like Trusts and Estates law. A viable niche would be “Trust & Estates Law for Multi-generational Family Businesses.” However, focusing your marketing efforts on a single micro-niche doesn’t preclude your serving clients in other areas. - Distribute Your Content (using social media)
This is all about getting your content in front of the right eyeballs. Traditionally, we used email or snailmail – or published articles in trade journals. However, social networking technologies like LinkedIn and Twitter are increasingly proving to be effective distribution tools.
The trick with social media is that you need to resist the temptation to be social beyond what is necessary to help generate business. Instead, you want to focus on creating a one-way dialog. This means using LinkedIn and Twitter to announce to your network that you’ve published new content – and offer them a link to read it. That’s all.
Does it work?
We are often asked, “Will my efforts attract clients?” It’s a completely valid question, and the answer is an emphatic yes. But it isn’t for everyone. It takes time and it takes commitment. Recent studies show that the cumulative effort of writing informative content in a chosen niche will undoubtedly grow your practice (The Attorney Hiring Zone, Nov 2009, BTI Consulting Group). However, it requires the right strategy, which we’ve outlined below.
How to do it
While the benefits of online reputation-building are clear, it’s often unclear how one goes about using social networking tools to help build a reputation. Where do I start? What is the right approach? And what exactly should I do? Below is a rough outline of our recommended strategy.
To keep things simple, we’re focusing only on the essential social media tools for online reputation-building: LinkedIn and Twitter.
LinkedIn is a vibrant community of over 60 million business professionals. Chances are that most of your colleagues already have a presence on LinkedIn. In order to begin taking advantage of LinkedIn, you need to have created a LinkedIn profile that is loaded with good information about yourself and you should be linked with a fairly wide group of people.
The key to using LinkedIn as a reputation-building tool is the “Network Updates” feature. You would use this broadcast feature to alert the people in your network every time you post a piece of thought-leadership content to your blog or website.
Making a network update is quick and simple. Just log into your LinkedIn account and type in a brief message into the Network Update field. Here’s a sample network update that an attorney might post:
I just added a new blog post about Chapter 7 Debtors’ Liability – an important subject in these tough times: www.Chapter7lawblog.com
Then you click “Share.” And you’re done. Your update will be sent to the people in your network as part of a weekly digest of updates. What does this accomplish? Three things:
- You will drive readers to your thought-leadership pieces. This will help build a following, which is key to building your reputation as “the” expert in your niche.
- You will raise your visibility. Even if people don’t click over and read your pieces, they will probably scan the weekly “Network Updates” email. This alone will help build your personal brand and keep your name front-of-mind.
- You will create a record of your activity. LinkedIn displays an archive of your activity on your profile page. As people visit your profile in the future, they will see lots of links to your thought-leadership content.
Twitter is a relatively new technology that evokes strong feelings among marketing experts. Some love it and others dismiss it as CB radio for the 21st Century (i.e., a waste of time).
However, our research shows that Twitter offers much promise as a broadcast medium – similar to LinkedIn network updates. You’ll want to use Twitter in almost exactly the same way that you use LinkedIn – as a means of letting your followers know that you have a new piece of thought-leadership content for them to read. While LinkedIn and Twitter may appear to be performing the same function, each will be hitting different groups:
- Your LinkedIn network, by its very nature, contains mostly people you already know.
- Twitter offers you the promise of hitting a wider audience of people who have never met you – yet are interested in hearing your thoughts.
The challenge with Twitter is generating a following that contains business prospects and other thought leaders in your niche. This isn’t terribly difficult, it just requires that you do two things:
- Start sending out messages (tweets) at least once per week. These tweets should alert your followers about your newly published thought-leadership content. On occasion, you may also want to send out random tweets commenting on happenings in your niche.
- Start following lots of people on Twitter. This will coax many of those people to in turn follow you. It’s best to be selective in the types of people that you target. For example, you might want to start by searching the names on your prospect list to see if any of them are using Twitter.
Note: If it seems that LinkedIn updates and Twitter posts are practically the same thing, you’re correct. Both are text messages that can contain a maximum of 140 characters. In fact, you can have your Twitter posts automatically appear as LinkedIn updates and, likewise, you can have your LinkedIn updates automatically sent out via Twitter.
What about Blogging?
Blogging is a vital tool in online reputation-building – and it works very well in conjunction with Twitter and LinkedIn. However, while blogs are often grouped with social media tools, we consider them to be more of a publishing platform (like a website). Thus, we are not including much about blogs in this article. That said, we’ve written a separate article about blogging entitled Blogging: Best Practices for Attorneys. We highly encourage you to read this article.
What about Facebook?
Despite being the largest social network on the internet, Facebook doesn’t offer many marketing opportunities for most attorneys. For one thing, it’s very social (and thus very time consuming). Additionally, it’s really focused on bringing together friends and relatives – not business prospects and providers. We recommend that attorneys keep their Facebook activity entirely personal – and use LinkedIn and Twitter for their business-development efforts. That said, attorneys that serve individuals – like divorce lawyers and those that perform real estate closings – may find Facebook to be a useful marketing tool.
Your home base – a good website
Social media works best when there’s a good “home base” to which you can drive potential clients after they have read your blog or a tweet – or an article you wrote. For lawyers, this home base is usually the bio page on your firm’s website.
Thus, it’s absolutely vital that your bio make a compelling case to hire you. This means not only that your bio should contain basic CV data, it should contain detailed information about your expertise and experience (like case studies) and should act as a repository for all of your thought-leadership work. Unfortunately, most attorney bios fall short in most of these areas.
For more information on creating a good “home base,” I encourage you to read our article about the next-generation law firm websites. We call them Rainmaker-Focused websites and they incorporate robust, multi-page attorney profiles that can act as a repository for all the content that an attorney creates. These next-generation websites are designed to work hand-in-hand with social networking tools.
