Preparing a social media strategy for your legal directory rankings
16 October 2023
Lawyers work incredibly hard to get their legal directory rankings in Chambers & Partners and Legal 500. Thousands of lawyers seek a ranking in legal directories, so when they’re ranked, it’s an incredible achievement.
It’s no wonder that you immediately take to social media to tell your peers, partners, and budding relationships about your success. However, so does every lawyer who receives a ranking. And, often at exactly the same time.
What this means is social media users will often scroll through dozens of posts that look and say the same, leading to them quickly getting bored. This results in poor engagement from those outside of your own firm, and the recognition you deserve can be all but lost. This is why preparing a social media strategy is important for law firms.
Here, we provide a step-by-step guide to creating a social media strategy for your legal directory rankings.
Who is your audience?
Firstly, consider who you want to read your social media posts about your legal directory rankings. You could be aiming your posts at people such as:
- Industry specialists
- Potential third-party referrers
- The general public
- CEOs and managing directors
- Solicitors considering new employment
The simple answer might be ‘all of them’! However, you still need to consider this so you know how best to craft your post, so it speaks directly to your audience and engages them.
What are you trying to achieve?
Next, you need to consider what you’re trying to achieve. There are numerous goals you may be trying to fulfil, such as:
- Demonstrate your expertise
- Demonstrate yourself as a thought leader
- Highlight your firm as being a desirable place to work
- Get more followers / connections
- Increase your post engagement
It’s important that you understand your goals so you can craft your post accordingly, giving you a greater chance of success.
Which social media platforms should you use?
If your post is for the general public, depending on the demographic of your audience, you may want to consider Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or TikTok. If your post is aimed at solicitors considering new employment, LinkedIn is probably the best platform to use. Whoever your audience is, you need to choose the best platform for engagement from that audience.
You might be tempted to push the same social media posts highlighting your legal directory rankings across all your social media platforms to save some time. However, you may be missing a trick.
If you want your post to demonstrate your expertise to the general public and also to showcase your firm as the place to work, using different messages across those different platforms, and targeting the right audience, is likely to be more successful.
What should your posts say?
Once you know your audience and your goals, you should know the message that you need to convey, but you need to consider how you say it. Remember, not everyone understands legal jargon, and many people outside of the legal industry won’t have even heard of Chambers & Partners or Legal 500.
If you’re posting about specific lawyers from your firm’s social media accounts, make sure you tag them in the post where possible. Lawyers posting from their personal accounts should tag in your firm.
Including hashtags in your posts is important as it will help your posts show up in searches. When deciding on what hashtags to include, think about the topics of your posts and your goals.
What visual content should you use?
According to a report by Hootsuite, LinkedIn posts with images have an average 98% higher comment rate, and Tweets with visual content are three times more likely to get engagement. This demonstrates that social media posts perform much better when they have visual content.
Visual content can include:
- Photographs
- Videos
- Carousels
- GIFs
- Illustrations
- Infographics
- Animations
- Memes
When deciding what visual content you should use, you should think about your audience and the type of visual content they’re likely to engage most with.
Once you’ve decided on the type of visual content, consider how you can make it stand out from the rest.
What CTA should you use?
We believe that every post should have a call to action. Although it’s not always necessary for a post to direct the reader to a ‘contact us’ function or an email address, if people have enjoyed reading your post and want to find out more, a URL link to your website can be extremely beneficial.
Again, think about your goals. If you’re looking at it from a recruitment point of view, include the URL link to your careers page. If you’re highlighting your company’s expertise in a specific practice area, include the URL link to that practice page. If you’re demonstrating a specific lawyer as a thought leader, include the URL link to their website profile. The pages on your website should act as conversion tools, as well as providing much needed information. So, you may find you get more work from posts that include URL links.
In order to monitor how many people are directed to your website through those URLs, you can create UTM links. UTM links enable you to see from your Google Analytics how successful they are. For lawyers wishing to include UTM links in their posts, speak to your marketing team. Remember to shorten any URL or UTM links when including them in social media posts.
When should you schedule your posts to be distributed?
The first thing to do is create a social media calendar and look at everything you have going out about the legal directory rankings. You’ll no doubt have prepared blogs to run alongside your posts, so you need to ensure everything is included and spaced out accordingly. We’d suggest doing a maximum of one per day.
Employee engagement is a great way to get your social media content on the map. Therefore, once you’ve put a comprehensive calendar together, send it around the firm, so people know what’s going out and when. That way, they can be prepared to help promote the posts where possible.
Remember, you don’t have to send your posts the second you find out about your legal directory rankings. Be strategic in your approach. It’s not about getting there first, it’s about fulfilling those goals!
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All content in this article was correct at the time of publication.
