With 2.3 billion people on social media and a growth of over 10% in users since 2015, it’s difficult to come up with any reasons why your legal firm shouldn’t be on social media. So here are four steps to help you build a successful social media strategy for your practice.

Step one: Research your audience

The first step is pretty simple but without it your social media strategy is sure to fail. So it’s key that you research and build well-developed claimant personas. Here you need to look into the goals and challenges of your potential claimants as well as their demographics; it can also help to create a fictional story for your persona to help you apply your social strategy to. Make your personas here.

Step two: Know your platforms

Once you’ve created your claimant persona it’s time to investigate what social platforms will suit your legal firm best, a lot of this will come from your claimant personas as you want to be using the platforms that they use most, but you’ll also need to pay attention to the platform’s rules and guidelines and make sure they don’t conflict with any of your business’.

Step three: Understand your proposition

Step three is to understand what your legal firm has to offer on social media and why people should follow you. This is important as to do social media properly it takes a lot of time and effort so, you need to be certain that potential claimants will want to engage with you on those channels. A good place to start is to look at how key influencers and competitors are using social media and what is working well for them. Now you don’t want to simply copy them as you won’t be offering anyone anything new but you can look at different ways to produce similar style posts. If a competitor is mainly posting third party news stories, then create your own blog and add your firm’s view to legal news stories, or if your competitor is posting blog content then can you use a more visual content tool to create your content such as video or infographics.

Step four: Know how you’ll measure success

Finally, to build a successful social media strategy you need to have a clear understanding of how you will measure its success. Metrics such as new claimants gained are great and an easy way to get buy-in from senior management but won’t reflect the other aspects of social media. On the other hand, metrics like the number of followers is too high-level not really giving you enough information on the success of your social media efforts. A good place to focus is on engagement metrics looking at shares; comments; click through rate and to a lesser extent, likes. These will allow you and your firm to get a better understanding of how your followers are interacting with your content across your social platforms.

So there you have it, four simple steps to help you build a successful social media strategy. But don’t forget that without great content you’ll have nothing to share on your social platforms, so why not check out our eBook and get some great content marketing tips? 9 Content Marketing Tips for the Legal Sector