Does your firm handle its own social media efforts or outsource the job? Both methods have pros and cons.

Due to the time-consuming and somewhat arduous nature of social media marketing, many law firms opt to outsource much of their social media work. However, this can have its flaws because a firm’s unique personality can be lost. Each option has its own advantages — and disadvantages — you should consider when determining which course of action is right for your legal practice.

The pros and cons of outsourcing

Perhaps the biggest benefit of outsourcing your social media efforts is the time you can save on social media marketing. Rather than spending a large portion of your work week on this, hiring an agency or individual can free you up to take care of more pressing issues. Since people whose jobs involve social media marketing often eat, sleep and breathe it, many stay updated on cutting edge industry trends that you, as a lawyer, may not be exposed to in your line of work. This can mean increased exposure and user engagement with your content.

The main drawback of using an external company to build your social media presence is that many outsourced workers have multiple clients and may be more concerned with making money than building your brand or staying true to your voice. Consequently, the quality of content may suffer and you could lose valuable followers.

The pros and cons of building an internal social media team

Deciding to make a lawyer or other member of your team responsible for maintaining your social media presence is advantageous because you can rest assured that your message and style won’t be lost. A workers compensation law firm that prided itself on integrity and experience, for example, wouldn’t have to worry what could happen if someone unfamiliar with workers comp law tried to answer a question about a recent change in the law. Besides this, you have convenient access to media like pictures of your staff and events your firm attends, which can make tweets or Facebook posts much more engaging and personable. This level of control simply isn’t available if you choose to outsource 100 percent of your social media efforts.

The downside of keeping social media in house is that this may eat up a significant amount of time, which can be stressful when you’re working on serious cases. You may also find it difficult to stay abreast of new techniques, which can cause your social media efforts to suffer. What worked six months ago with social media may not work now due to the rapidly changing nature of the Internet.

Blending your social media efforts

Sticking entirely with one approach to social media marketing can be detrimental because of unavoidable flaws. That’s why it’s smart to take more of a blended approach. If an in-house team member passionate about your firm works with a contact from an agency, you get to take advantage of the best of both worlds. Help your social media efforts prosper!

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

Facebook’s new replies feature makes comments on posts much more orderly.

Facebook has finally responded to requests to improve its comments feature by implementing Replies functionality. This means that users will be able to have conversations with one another more easily.

How Replies works

Facebook Replies is a site-wide change that will make it easier to reply to specific comments on posts. This will improve community engagement on company pages like your law firm’s Facebook profile and make it easier for users to have extended conversations.

Replies uses threading, meaning that threads of conversation will be listed one after another following an initial post. If you make a post and three people respond, someone looking at the comments will be able to either comment directly on your post or comment as replies to what previous posters have said. You may have several different conversations happening on each post. Conversations are arranged according to popularity, similar to Reddit; the most popular initial posts will be listed on top.

Impact for your firm

Most analysts predict that this will make it easier for Facebook business profiles to drive more interest in their posts. However, you may have to take advantage of the new changes. The best way to do so is to change your calls to action to drive more comments. You may also want to change your posts to drive more conversations.

For instance, you could post about newsworthy topics in your field. As a Sacramento motorcycle accident attorney, you could post questions about recent settlements in your area and open up the conversation about the size of a settlement or whether fault should have been attributed to another party as well. You could also post any recent changes to local, state or national laws related to your field and ask questions about how those changes might affect your readers’ lives.

With the new Replies feature, conversation on Facebook will become easier and hopefully more popular. It is your job as an Internet marketer to take advantage of that popularity and drive more conversation on your Facebook page.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

Is your post receiving plenty of +1s? Google+ Ripples can show you!

A fascinating feature known as Ripples has managed to fly under the radar of many Google+ users since it was released about a year and a half ago. Not too many business owners know about this social sharing tool, which allows users to track the effectiveness of particular posts using an intuitive, visual framework. Lawyers and law firm marketers could benefit from using Google+ Ripples to measure the spread of particular posts and work toward improving their posts’ viability and effectiveness.

How Ripples works

Ripples is accessed on Google+ by clicking on the small icon in the upper right area of any given post. You can click “View Ripples,” and a screen with several circles will pop up. Each circle represents a user who shared or re-shared your post, and circles within circles represent second-tier shares (as in someone who shared someone else’s share of your post).

The denser the Ripples diagram, the more popular a particular post was. It is an excellent visual way to measure viral posts on Google+ and a quick, easy way to get a sense of the effectiveness of your Google+ posting strategy. In case you also want some numbers to back up the image, Ripples provides statistics for how many people shared that particular post.

How to best use Ripples

Google+ Ripples is useful for a number of purposes related to your firm. As a Denver drug crimes defense lawyer, it can help you identify the people who find your posts particularly useful. These could be past clients who keeping tabs on you in case they need your services in the future, legal news junkies, other professionals in your area or even potential future clients who might respond well to personal outreach.

Using Ripples to examine other posts in your field helps you figure out which Google+ accounts tend to be big influencers. If you can get influencers to share your posts, you may be able to reach a wider social audience. Targeting these people for outreach and relationship can be very beneficial for your firm.

Ripples as tool for social growth

So many analytic tools are filled with tables, charts and numbers that it can be refreshing to get an immediate, visual sense for a post’s popularity. Google+ Ripples is fun to play around with, so get to clicking and do research to benefit your firm’s social growth today!

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

In the social media arena, search is the final frontier. Major search engine providers such as Google and Bing have attempted to truly integrate social media into their content discovery strategies with mixed results: Google created its own social network, and Microsoft added a social media sidebar to Bing. Social networking giant Facebook is busy with its Open Graph Search, and LinkedIn has made its own search function smarter.

According to an official post by LinkedIn, more than 5.5 billion searches were conducted in 2012 within the network. This should not be surprising to legal professionals who are LinkedIn members as there is a vast amount of business intelligence to be found in the profiles, groups, discussions and updates of the network.

The new LinkedIn search

LinkedIn wants to encourage more searches by providing a more intuitive experience. This is accomplished with an update to the search query algorithm, which will learn by analyzing each user’s queries over time. The search has also been enhanced to allow advanced filtering. For example, a search for a Denver criminal lawyer may be narrowed down to the law school attended and sub-specialties such as drug or white collar crimes.

The new LinkedIn search also incorporates some predictive features such as auto-complete and suggested search queries. These two features will learn from the input of millions of users and will consequently improve over time. Users will also have the option of saving a specific search query as an alert for the purpose of being reminded of new results as they become available or are updated.

Legal professionals must keep in mind that these search improvements present new opportunities to be found within LinkedIn, but only if they observe some search engine optimization principles. Profiles must be 100 percent completed and should contain relevant keywords. LinkedIn profiles should be a portal or gateway to professional websites where visitors are welcome with engaging content.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

Lawyers can build a strong community on Google+…but first they have to find people to connect with.

Google’s own social network has traveled far from its fledgling status this past year. It has more than 200 million active members and 300,000 brands with accounts, and is Google+ is rapidly coming of age with an impressive array of features. Many of these features focus on dynamic social interaction and collaboration, which seems to be a salient point for the company behind the social network. Google+ wants to entice members who want to get things done and thus are more likely to stay logged in — but it can be hard for new users to connect with others. That’s where Find People on Plus comes in.

Finding an audience on Google+

Marketing success on Google+ is all about joining and targeting the right circles. Legal professionals who set up a business profile for the first time will find the usual tools to discover and invite current contacts to join them in Google+, but this has a limited effect on the expansion of social circles.

Find People on Plus is a third-party site that takes advantage of the Google+ application programming interface (API) to offer a comprehensive member directory. The default offering is a list of the most popular users on Google+ such as pop singer Britney Spears and astronaut Ron Garan. Users have many options to browse, search and filter the directory by age, university affiliation, employer, occupation, city and more. The service makes connecting with others much easier on Google+, which means those new to the social platform are more likely to stay and become active members.

Google+ is still in a maturing stage, which makes it perfect for legal professionals who practice niche marketing strategies. An attorney who specializes in wrongful death cases can build up an early audience with the right number of followers in well-defined circles that will naturally expand as more people join Google+. In fact, the Google+ Communities are some of the best marketing tools available to legal professionals now.

Google will probably enhance its own social network search so that attorneys and other members can easily build their own circles, but this does not mean that great third-party tools based on the Google+ API will stop being developed. Find People on Plus is likely just the beginning here — the pioneer leading the way!

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

The newest iteration of Facebook’s News Feed brings both good and bad changes for law firms.

Spring is upon us, and new changes are yet again in the works for Facebook, which is seeking to redesign its site to give more filtering power to users. Users will be able to filter what type of posts they see as well as whether they prefer only seeing their friends, companies or brands they follow or only images, music, games, group announcements and other media types.

While this news feed change hasn’t hit the world’s largest social network just yet, many lawyers and law firm marketers are considering how this will affect their business and social media marketing efforts.

The downsides

The new Facebook feed may make it easier for users to opt out of receiving branded communication from your firm’s page. Much will depend on users’ settings. As a Tucson eminent domain attorney, your posts may still be seen as before through sponsored posts, but that costs extra money that your firm may not be able to spare.

One way to get around that, however, involves posting images or rich media content so that your branded communication will land alongside friends of your fans’ pictures, driving greater interest.

The upsides

The coming updates to the news feed make images far more prominent. Facebook studies have revealed that images are one of the most popular forms of shared media on the site — and indeed, on the Internet in general. If you can develop a style of visual advertising for your firm, you will be able to garner a greater following with the new feed. Your images will be shown larger in the wider feed, and if someone Likes your page, your logo will be shown as a large image to that person’s friends.

Additionally, if you share links or video, the image associated with that link will be larger, making it draw the eye more than other posters’ text-only content.

It appears that Facebook is trying to modify its design to improve upon what its viewers like. Adapting to this and modifying your advertising campaign efforts accordingly is the soundest approach for your firm in light of these changes.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

Knowing how to talk on Twitter can be half the battle for some attorneys new to the social network.

Social media will always be a confusing beast, but no one can befuddle the masses quite like Twitter. Are you tweeting or twittering? How many followers have you gained today? Did you hashtag that MT during FF’s trending topic?

If you’re struggling to understand the language of your social media peers, here are a few words you should add to your vocabulary.

Your most basic Twitter terminology

Hashtag — One of the most ubiquitous features of Twitter, the hashtag (#) is used to note keywords or general topics of a given tweet. For example, if someone is tweeting about your law firm, they might say “Won my case with [your law firm's name]. #LoveMyLawyer” Hashtags also function as links to other posts with the same hashtag, so popular tags can become trends.

Trends — Trends are hashtags that have gained a following. This is the golden egg of Twitter; trending topics come with rankings and prestige and can even reach the national media if they’re large or bizarre enough. So if someone else loves their lawyer, they might chime in with “No one does it better than [their lawyer's name]. #LoveMyLawyer” or a comedian might quip, “The only time I #LoveMyLawyer is when he’s walking away.”

MT and RT — Standing for “modified tweet” and “retweet,” respectively, these are short abbreviations to let your followers know that the tweet isn’t your own. They can be used to shorten, summarize or just share big news with others. For example, “New York attorney wins his thousandth drunk driving case for NYC residents.” can be retweeted as a simple “MT: Thousandth case dismissed for NYC DWI lawyer.”

These are just a few samples of the new jargon rising up with Twitter, and it’s important you understand what they mean so your law firm doesn’t get left behind. With 200 million active users and almost 350 million tweets a day, knowing how to use Twitter is one of the smartest social media moves your law firm can make.

(By the way, if you’re wondering, FF is Follow Friday, a move where Twitter users suggest accounts others should follow.)

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

Do your Facebook images comply with the newest rules?

In order to combat what it determines to be “blatant commercialism,” Facebook has implemented strict rules regarding the images that businesses can post. This is important for lawyers and legal marketers to understand, as it could affect design choices and future posts.

Guidelines for cover images

The most stringent guidelines involve the banner at the top of your company’s Facebook page. Many companies use this to promote their business or brand, but be sure to follow these rules, or you may find your page taken down. Under the new guidelines, you may not:

1. Use images with more than 20 percent text, including the stylized name of your business
2. Include price or purchase information
3. Include contact information — put this in your page’s About section
4. Make reference to Facebook actions (i.e. no arrows to the Facebook “Like” button underneath the banner)
5. Use calls to action of any sort.

Guidelines for promoted or sponsored stories

Facebook allows you to promote certain posts for a small fee, pushing them into more people’s news feeds. However, if these promoted posts consist of images for your Calhoun divorce attorneys firm, be sure that they don’t consist of more than 20 percent text. You can find out if your image makes the grade by overlaying a 5×5 grid on top of your image. If text is in more than five of the boxes, you will have to find a different image.

Keep in mind that this only applies for promoted posts. If you don’t plan on promoting a particular Facebook post, you can continue posting whatever images you want to post.

What’s the point?

Facebook wants the user experience of the News Feed to be like connecting with friends and loved ones even as it gradually becomes saturated with advertisements for companies like yours. Text in photos from companies and brands is often perceived as “inauthentic.” Above all, as long as you keep your images simple, you will not fall afoul of Facebook’s new text rule for images. Good luck, and happy posting!

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.