Attorney Social Media Marketing

Having a great website is not enough. To maintain the top position in the search engines you must effective harness the power of social media. Social media allows attorneys to actively promote their practice online and network with other attorneys. Properly utilizing social media can allow an attorney to accomplish all of the following goals:

• connect with local clients;
• strengthen their online reputation;
• drive traffic to their website;
• network with other legal professionals; and
• improve their website's search engine rankings.

At Internet LAVA we understand how important social media is to any attorney's internet marketing campaign. We do all the work by setting up all of your social media marketing platforms, linking them together (when appropriate), and allowing you and your staff the ability to focus on adding content that you are already using in other places.

Social media is gaining popularity because it is a great way to communicate a message. Once you learn the basics, you will realize that social media platforms actually save you time. 

Top Social Media Sites for Attorneys:

The Domino Effect - Why Social Media Saves You Time and Multiplies Your Efforts

A successful social media campaign can help improve your overall online presence. The process involves creating, optimizing, connecting, and socializing in the most popular social media sites. When this is done correctly, the links to the information you submit will multiple quickly. See how the "Domino Effect" works by considering these two scenarios:

The most intriguing aspect of the second scenario is that because the attorney already had a strong social media presence prior to writing the article, it took less than 20 minutes to promote the article by using these online resources. As a result, the article received more than 16 times the amount of traffic in the first month.

Now do you understand what we mean by "Domino Effect?" The best social media sites are interconnected which means they communicate with each other. By multiplying your efforts you can quickly gain a huge advantage over your competition that does not yet understand how to harness the power of social media. Used effectively, social media will further increase the traffic to your website and improve the overall search rankings of the website.

What is Social Media?

Social Media is defined as any form of online content that can be published to the Internet by the common user via easily accessible online resources. This content is known as user-generated content. Social Media has transformed the way businesses and consumers communicate on a day-to-day basis. It allows the common every day user to publicly broadcast, publish, and distribute information quickly and easily. Social Media allows people anywhere in the world to connect instantly and actively share information such as news, videos, pictures, opinions, blogs, websites, and other content.

Media created through social interaction has a completely different kind of effect on business compared to traditional media. With traditional media, such as television, radio, and newspapers, the content is distributed as "one-to-many," meaning that one publishing or broadcasting entity distributes the content to many end-users. With social media, the content is distributed as "many-to-many," meaning that the end-user creates the content and actively engages many other end-users. Social media has revolutionized the way all of us communicate and conduct business every day.

The Social Media Revolution

Over the past several years, the popularity of social media has exploded across the Internet and has even been compared to the Industrial Revolution. It is important to realize that social media is not a fad and is not going away. It is a fundamental shift in the way the world actively communicates. For the legal community, it is important to embrace each of these new technologies as they arise because it will allow you to communicate more effectively with your ideal clients.

How can Social Media help my Legal Practice?

Attorneys can use social media to actively promote their legal practice online in several ways:

Make Sure that Your Social Media Campaign is Managed Properly

Simply creating social media pages and linking them to your website is not enough to achieve the desired results. While inbound links from social media sites will help with link popularity, the main benefits can not be achieved unless the links are properly optimized to connect with hundreds of different interior pages within your main website.

Several factors play an important role in achieving a successful social media marketing campaign. At Internet LAVA we have a formula that is constantly updated to include new social media sites. Within a matter of weeks we can create your profiles and teach you how to most effectively use your time to communicate your message to your ideal clients.

Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO) for attorneys is a process of attracting your ideal clients to your content by promoting and publicizing it through social media. While search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on your main website, optimizing your social media sites also indirectly benefits the main website.

Creating posts on social media pages that have an interesting description and directly promote your firm's online material can cause a wave of traffic to your main website. For example, you can tweet or post an entry to your Facebook page that directly promotes an interior page of your website, or one of your blog entries.

Social Page Relevance

It is important that each social media page you create is relevant to your area of law to ensure better search rankings for your social media sites and your main website. Each link that points to your main website from other sites needs to contain information that is directly related to your area of legal practice.

Of course, sites like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MerchantCircle are not exactly related to the legal industry. So how do you improve page relevance? You make them relevant. This can be achieved in several ways, here are just a few:

• Attorney's Google+ Profile: each attorney in the firm should have a Google+ profile. When that attorney writes an articles or wants to point out a particular issue mentioned on the law firm's website, Google+ profiles the perfect platform. Additionally, the attorney can share information from the law firm's Google+ Page.

• Law Firm's Google+ Page: the law firm should create a Google+ Page for the firm which highlights firm news and articles writen by the individual attorneys. The attorneys can then "share" posts from the Google+ Page or the firm can "share" posts from the individual attorney's Google+ Profile.

• Attorney's LinkedIn Profile: add several paragraphs of information about your legal practice, add an RSS feed from your blogs, connect your Twitter status updates which will be displayed on the LinkedIn profile, and connect with other attorneys in your practice area throughout the country;

• Law Firm's MerchantCirle Listings: add information about your law firm, post regular blog entries that can include a short summary about the topic and a link directly to your website, connect with other business that are related to your business.

• Law Firm's Facebook Page: add information about your firm, link to interior pages in your website to notify your connections about interesting information contained deep within your website, post "notes" which are short paragraphs about a particular subject with links to the same information contained on your main website, link to other information on the internet about your speaking engagements or other activities.

• Attorney's Twitter Account: Publish regular tweets about related legal topics to your Twitter page, link to a particular interior page on your main website, and retweet interesting articles from other legal professionals.

We created this summary of some of our techniques to give you a general idea about what we can do to improve the effectiveness of our social media efforts. Busy attorneys worry that they will not have the time or energy to do it properly. At Internet LAVA we work hard to to set up all the accounts properly. We can provide you with tips on how to use the profiles most effectively. When we create a new page of content for your website, with your permission, we can promote the information across your social media profiles for you.

At Internet LAVA, we save the busy attorney a tremendous amount of time and frustration by creating the framework for a successful social media presence.

Social Networking

Making friends and forming connections is an important aspect of social media and can directly promote your law firm to your ideal clients. Traffic is a big factor in both page relevance and link popularity. The more traffic your social media pages receive then the more traffic they will drive directly to your website. Increasing traffic to your social media will also improve the value of the links that point to your website and in turn, will improve your website's search visibility.

The reason why search engines love social media pages so much is because they are constantly being browsed and updated. If you simply create a social media profile, and then neglect it, it will become static and will not help your cause.

The more connections that you have on your social media profiles the more traffic you will receive to your website. When all of the profiles are properly linked, many attorneys are surprised at the wave of connections that find those sites. Forming these connections by obtaining "friends" "followers" "fans" or "connections" is extremely important to successfully marketing your practice through social media.

Social Promotional Activities

Stay involved and keep your visitor engaged by actively participating in social promotion. Be social and regularly communicate with your audience. Post comments on your law firm's page. If you read an interesting blog entry that was posted by another attorney then comment on it. If you find a website that is interesting and relevant to your practice then bookmark it. If you think of an interesting point that you feel your audience should know then tweet about it.

For most attorneys, the majority of time they spend online is spent reading and looking at content that is in some way related to their legal field. Why not spend a few extra minutes each week and share this content with your audience? The more you actively participate in social promotion the more your social media pages will benefit and the more traffic your website will ultimately receive.

Internet LAVA's Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign for Lawyers

Building a successful social media campaign requires properly creating and optimizing several different social media pages. In addition, it also requires regular networking with people and routinely distributing content. Although using these readily available online resources is virtually free for anyone, for it to be done properly requires a great deal of time and energy.

At Internet LAVA, we specialize in managing your social media campaign for you so you can focus on your practice and your clients. At the same time, we give you login access to each social media profile we create on your behalf allowing you to login and further promote your law firm. Most attorneys find that once they have the proper social media structure in place, it is fun to create content and distribute it to a vast audience. For more information on internet marketing for lawyers call us today at 1 (800) 292-LAVA.

Quick Video Explains Social Media Revolution:

Interesting Social Media Statistics

How many years did it take for other forms of media to reach 50 million users?

• Radio - 38 years
• Television - 13 years
• Internet - 4 years
• iPod - 3 years
• Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months!

Other interesting social media statistics: 

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th most populated in the world, behind China, India, and the United States.
• YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world.
• There are over 200,000,000 blogs.
• Over 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.
• YouTube hosts over 120 million videos.
• 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees.
• An average of 27.3 million tweets are published on Twitter in a single day.

Social Media Solutions for Busy Attorneys

At Internet LAVA we understand that staying one step ahead of the competition requires using emerging technologies. Social media is one of the most important and efficient ways of spreading exposure for your main website while  managing your online identity. Busy attorneys can either start from scratch and spend years learning how to effectively manage their social media profiles, or busy attorneys can rely on Internet LAVA to set up every profile, link them together, and allow the "domino effect" to multiple their efforts.

Call us today to see what we have done for busy attorneys like you. Call 1-800-292-LAVA for a free consultation to find out more about everything from websites design for attorneys, writing content for an attorney website, finding the best content management system to demontrating how you can use social media to market your law firm.

Resources for Lawyers Using Social Media

Many In-House Counsel Are Social Media Savvy. But Biglaw Firms? Not So Much - Great article pointing to a recent survey of 164 in-house counsel attorneys about their social media habits. The survey shows that in-house counsel attorneys are using social media including blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for business purposes and to judge law firms. Big law firms tend to be the resistant to allowing their attorneys to effectively use social media. Small and mid-size firms can use this to their advantage by developing effective social media campaigns that focus on the strengths and personal style of their individual attorneys.