Social Media for Lawyers: The Dos & Dont’s You Need to Know About in 2024

Social media is an important tool for both lawyers and law firms. It helps expand a firm’s reach, attract clients, and build positive relationships. However, only some lawyers use social media marketing techniques to their full potential, while others may be actively hurting their brand or reputation by posting online.

Whether they forget to proofread posts, violate legal regulations, or ignore comments, these common social media mistakes can have severe consequences.

In an effort to help, we’ve created a guide that covers several dos and don’ts to help lawyers and law firms succeed on social media.

Key Takeaways

The benefits of using social media for lawyers include building a brand, reaching and retaining clients, networking, and keeping an eyes on what competitors are doing online.

When using social media, lawyers should know their audience, have a schedule, set goals, and measure success.

Don’t post the same things continuously, forget to proofread posts, violate important rules and regulations, or ignore comments.

Benefits of Social Media for Lawyers

If you’re a lawyer or law firm, social media helps you:

• Build your brand and become an authority in your space
• Reach more potential clients
• Monitor your online reputation
• Foster relationships with peers and help you network with referral partners
• Keep an eye on competitors’ social media activities
• Generate leads
• Stay up-to-date on legal trends

Choosing the Right Social Media Platform

Before you start posting, it’s a good idea to investigate each social media platform and decide which ones to focus on. Each has its own audience and types of content that perform better than others.

Here’s a closer look at some of the most important platforms for lawyers, as well as what types of content to use on each one.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a platform made for business, so it makes sense for your firm to have a presence there. It’s very popular amongst professionals and is useful for connecting with other lawyers or firms, participating in law-related discussions, and finding business clients.

Content like professional blog posts, educational subject matter, legal case studies, and detailed insights are best for this platform.

Instagram

Instagram is a visual platform that’s great for telling stories and humanizing your firm. It enables you to connect on an individual level with potential clients of all kinds, as a variety of people use the platform.

The best type of content for Instagram is visual, entertaining, and easily digestible. This includes short videos, slideshows, infographics, or even a “behind the scenes” look at your office.

Twitter/X

Twitter/X is a platform focused on concision and efficiency, as posts are short and to the point. As it’s based on trending topics and hashtags, it’s great for participating in discussions on hot topics and offering legal analysis in real-time.

Types of content that lawyers and law firms may post on Twitter/X include brief insights or advice, press releases or firm updates, and commentary on legal news.

TikTok

TikTok is among the most popular platforms for younger people, and is based around short videos. People on the platform are highly engaged, and value authentic and entertaining content.

Content that does well here includes videos answering common law-related questions, relatable videos, skits based on current TikTok trends, or videos that break down complex legal topics in ways anyone can understand.

Social Media Dos and Don’ts For Lawyers

Now that you’re aware of the benefits of social media for lawyers and the best platforms to use, let’s take a closer look at some dos and don’ts.

Do: Understand Your Audience

First, you’ll want to ensure you know your target audience. This is the group of people you’re aiming to reach with your posts—those who are most likely to want or need your services.

Make sure to know the services they’re looking for and the kind of content they’d like to see. You can find this out through market research, interviews with potential customers, or competitor analysis.

All types of people have social media accounts today. Make sure you know the age, interests, income, location, values, and pain points of your audience to ensure you can target them as specifically as possible.

Don’t: Solely Post Marketing and Promotional Content

If everything you post is an ad, a celebration of your success, or a highlight of your services, it comes off as spammy and may drive potential clients and followers away. Instead, ensure that most of your content is valuable.

In general, you’ll want to focus 80% of your posts on providing direct value to the reader in some way and limit your promotional or marketing-related posts to about 20%.

This value may be teaching your followers something, entertaining them, answering a question, solving a problem, or inspiring them.

Also, don’t hesitate to make personal posts from time to time, too. These help your business be relatable and may touch the reader’s emotions. You could feature a specific team member in a video, tell a story about how you got started in law, or share photos of your family/pets.

However, there are also some personal posts you shouldn’t make on a professional account. For example, you shouldn’t:

• Rant about things unrelated to your business or industry (such as getting cut off in traffic or your home internet provider being lackluster)
• Post negative personal opinions about other people, places, or things
• Post your political or religious beliefs unless related to your firm
• Argue with comments or other individuals/firms

Do: Have a Schedule and Content Calendar

You should aim to post consistently on social media, generally a few times a week. However, this can be hard when you’re also running a practice or working hard to make a name for yourself.

That’s where a content calendar comes in handy. Use it to plan your content in advance, which is less stressful than coming up with new posts on the spot. By using scheduling software you may even be able to automatically publish your posts at specific times or days.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to handle social media posting at all, you can work with a social media marketing agency instead.

Don’t: Violate the Rules and Regulations

When you post on social media, it’s important to follow the rules. The American Bar Association (ABA) has a set of guidelines for legal professionals to abide by called the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. These specify what kind of conduct is inappropriate on social media and in general.

For example, Rule 1.6 states that you shouldn’t reveal information related to a client or case unless you’re given permission.

Rule 7.1 says that you can’t make false or misleading claims about your legal services, so be careful posting things like “Best lawyer in [city]” or “Cheapest lawyer in [city]”.

Similarly, Rule 7.2 states that you can’t imply you’re an expert or a specialist in a given field unless you’ve been certified as such by an appropriate authority.

Ultimately, it’s important to know these rules and ensure you’re not posting content or insights that violate them in any way.

Do: Check Out Your Competitors

Make sure to check out your competition’s social media profiles. Their posts can give you ideas and let you see what types of content perform well and excite readers/followers (and what doesn’t) before you try it yourself. Of course, don’t plagiarize and steal content directly. Just use it as inspiration.

Competitor analysis also helps you identify gaps in the industry, which you can use to your advantage to create a competitive edge and differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack.

You should also keep up with large legal influencers or other powerful names in your space. They’re often on the cutting edge of what’s popular or trending.

Don’t: Post Without Proofreading

When posting on a personal account, making a spelling mistake or other grammatical error isn’t a huge deal. However, when you’re posting on a professional account, make sure to proofread every word before posting.

If you publish content with grammatical or spelling mistakes, it will make you look less professional and hurt your image. It detracts from what you’re saying in the post and may turn some people off from hiring you, as they may be worried about your attention to detail.

Common issues to watch for when publishing your posts include:

• Inappropriate punctuation use
• Mixing up “to” and “too”
• Using “there”, “their”, and “they’re” incorrectly
• Applying capitalization to the wrong words
• Misspelling words

If you’re posting a longer piece of content such as an infographic or blog post, it’s a good idea to ask someone else to check for errors before posting. A fresh pair of eyes can catch things you missed.

Do: Set Goals and Measure Success

It’s essential to set goals for a successful social media strategy. They can give you clear targets to work toward, motivate you, and set expectations for success.

Goals you might set include the following:

• Boosting traffic to your website
• Increasing your customer base
• Becoming a thought leader in your industry
• Building brand awareness in your city
• Generating new leads
• Getting more emails for your newsletter

However, whichever goals you set, you want to ensure they’re realistic, measurable, and achievable. Also, make sure you’re setting both short and long-term goals.

It’s also important to track and collect analytics to help you measure your success and see if you’re reaching these goals. Otherwise, you may not know whether your tactics are paying off.

You should frequently check your analytics to monitor:

• How many likes, impressions, comments, and shares your posts get
• The amount of new followers you get
• How often people click on your content or links
• The reach of your page/profile
• Your conversion rate

This data helps you see what types of posts are working well for you and some areas that could use improvement. Don’t hesitate to change strategies or adjust your goals to better align with the data you’ve analyzed.

Don’t: Ignore Comments

A big part of social media is being social. If you receive questions, comments, or requests, acknowledge and respond to them. But again, don’t offer specific legal advice to people asking for it in the comments. Those conversations are better held offline and in private.

Responding to comments shows followers you care about their opinions and helps you build solid relationships. It also gives you a quick and easy way to provide even more value.

In addition to responding to comments, you can take things a step further and ask your readers or followers questions about the kinds of content they’d like to see. This helps you learn more about prospective clients and gives you ideas for future types of content you may want to create.

If you ignore comments, it makes your brand feel less personal, and fewer people may engage with your content. Even if you receive negative comments, adding a brief comment or acknowledging the issue is often better than ignoring it.