“Proper consideration of the business purposes and strategy for use of social media can assist in creating a plan to ensure that social media use is effective and efficient.”
This is an excerpt from “Social Media – Advice and Information for the Legal Profession” published last week by the Law Society of Scotland. It focuses on legal firms’ use of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, covering areas such as the development of a social media policy, the data and legal implications, risk, and ethical and security considerations. However, the most interesting part is the missed opportunity to outline the advantages for the legal profession if they align their use of social media to their business objectives.
Law firms need to be aware of risks and pitfalls but they should also be cognisant of the change in their clients’ buying behaviour and the need to maximise the kind of online engagement enabled by social media.
Bill Drummond, Managing Partner at Brodies LLP, recently stated in the online magazine Business Insider:
“Those firms that challenge convention and think creatively about their business model are nimble and agile in the execution of their plans, and who quickly organise themselves to deliver superior service, value and results to their clients will enjoy success.”
Many law firms still view their website and online activity as peripheral to their success and this is reflected in the plethora of brochure websites that are all about the firm and neither speak to their clients’ issues nor provide for online engagement.
However, the market for buying legal services has changed.
The customer journey to spending on legal fees increasingly is beginning online. They initiate multiple sessions across diverse media influenced by multiple marketing channels. Understanding how well they work and how they operate together is crucial for the legal profession and having the right online engagement model will become a competitive advantage for those firms that are nimble and agile enough.
One of our clients, a leading UK-based legal firm has developed just such a strategy and as a result in their first year of executing their online engagement model, which integrates search, social media and the publication of issues-based content, they have achieved:
- 202% increase in web traffic
- 245% rise in the number of new visits
- 700 new inbound links to their website
- 11,446 blog post impressions
- 347% growth in Twitter reach
- 686 new leads generated
- 76% of all organic traffic has come from core industry term searches and business solution queries, which means that the firm is now generating well-targeted traffic.
What the recently published social media guidelines don’t tell law firms is that they can transform their businesses by integrating their social media activity with their search and content publication to engage their potential customers in the manner and place they want to start their journey, which is online.
What do you think? Will you be making changes to your social media policies?
Image credit: ifindkarma, Flickr/Creative Commons
*Editor’s Note: Please note that this article was initially attributed to Biserka Anderson. It was brought to our attention that it was actually authored by her colleague, Johnny Mone, and thus the authorship has been changed to reflect that.