The document discusses a presentation on using social media for solicitors. It covers key platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ and how to build an audience and engage followers on each platform. It also discusses developing an effective social media strategy, setting objectives and metrics, and tools for managing social media. Future trends discussed include a move to more mobile and location-based social media.

1. Social Media for Solicitors
Tuesday February 5th 2013
@brainstormdsgn uk.linkedin.com/in/brainstormdigital

2. Key Learnings
• How to build up your audience and engage with your followers
• How to integrate social media with your other marketing
• How to convert your audience into leads and ultimately clients
• The pitfalls and dangers of social media
• Future trends you should know about
• How to develop a successful social media strategy
• Platforms we will cover:
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Youtube
- Google+
- Hootsuite
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3. What is social media?
• “All forms of electronic communication (e.g. blogs, forums)
through which users create online communities to share
information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such
as video)”
Merriam Webster
• “Think of social media as a telephone conversation that you can
hack into without breaking any laws” Danny Bermant
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5. Twitter facts
• Over 500 million users
• Strong for both B2C and B2B
• Over 340 million updates posted per day. Tweets have a short
shelf life - you need to post regularly
• Profiles can be both branded and personal
• You can follow and communicate with anyone
(provided they don’t have a protected profile)
• 2012 saw introduction of promoted tweets - you can pay extra to
see your updates at the top of a news feed
• Tweets and profiles can be easily searched. The more niche
your area, the easier it is to be discovered by your target market
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6. Twitter profiles can be branded or
personal. Ensure bio is complete!
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7. How your firm should be using
Twitter
• Your bio must have a USP
• Twitter should be a two way communication not just a news feed
• Educate, inform and engage with your audience
• You need to reach out to influential tweeters. Ensure you follow
relevant people
• Showcase the firms achievements e.g. landmark court case
• Share updates that are on other social media platforms
• Share the firms view e.g. blog post from managing partner
• Think of ways to promote user generated content:
• Engage with potential clients by asking questions, participating
in discussions and re-tweeting their posts
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8. Find influential followers using
“discover” tool.
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9. Use Lists to track their activity
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10. Check a user’s Klout score
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11. Use keywords, #hashtags and lists
to track relevant discussions
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12. Inform, educate and engage.
Include hyperlinks where possible
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13. A monologue
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14. A dialogue
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15. Tweets have a short shelf life. It’s
ok to repost earlier updates
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16. Being active on Twitter is easy
• Respond to, comment on, and re-tweet your followers
• Mention your other social media channels
• Share your blog post
• Share a news item
• Put out a tip
• Ask a question
• Mention your services and upcoming events
• Repeat all the above (reworded)
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18. LinkedIn facts
• Over 175 million users
• Often described as “Facebook for professionals”
• Used mainly for B2B marketing but even B2C companies use it
for sourcing staff and finding other businesses to collaborate
with
• Contains both personal and company profiles
• Has groups where you can network with like-minded
professionals
• Has a high conversion rate. 2.74% of visits convert to leads
(Hubspot)
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19. How your firm should be using
LinkedIn
• Connect with both existing and potential clients. Use LinkedIn to
keep in touch and continue educating them
• Use the LinkedIn database to seek out and qualify potential
leads
• Recruitment of staff, consultants and other professionals
• Brainstorming with other professionals and swapping ideas on
best practice
• Building alliances with others who will help promote you
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20. Profile should include a professional
headshot and professional headline
explaining how you add value
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21. Steps to completing your LinkedIn
profile
• Professional summary
• Status updates
• Full summary
• Recommendations
• Increase your connections
• Experience
• Projects
• Languages
• Certifications
• Publications
• Links to external files: images, videos, pdfs etc…
• Displaying your profile in other languages
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22. Regularly review your profile stats
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23. For LinkedIn to work effectively,
you need to grow your network
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24. Use your LinkedIn company page
to send status updates to followers
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25. You can display different service
offerings for different markets
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26. Groups enable you to brainstorm
and network with potential clients
as well as other professionals
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27. Create your own LinkedIn group
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28. Other social media tools
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29. YouTube
• Over 800 million monthly users
• Accepts most video formats
• Can be easily shared on all social media platforms making it
easy for the videos to go viral
• Can be easily uploaded from a smartphone
• Can be easily embedded on websites and blogs
• You can stream live events
• Popular with both B2C and B2B sectors. Used for ads, client
testimonials, interviews with staff, sharing product information
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30. If you run events, share them on Youtube
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31. Video testimonials from clients will
give more credibility than video
content from employees of the firm
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32. Share interviews with senior
partners
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33. Google+
• Has the appearance and many of the features of Facebook
• Users can post status updates and other users who are
connected can respond.
• Users can also hold video conversations, known as a hangout,
with their audience. Up to 9 people can join these conversations
• Hangouts can also be streamed via Youtube and embedded
within the user’s website
• Like Twitter, users follow each other rather than more formally
connecting with them
• Because it is integrated with Google’s search engine, it has the
potential to upstage both Facebook and Twitter. It currently has
400 million users, 235 million of whom are active monthly users
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34. Create photo albums, events and
even communities
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35. “Hangouts” can include up to 9 delegates
and can be streamed
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36. Developing a successful strategy
• Internal responsibilities for social media
• Internal processes and tools
• Developing an integrated strategy
• Measurements and effectiveness: KPIs
• Social media policy for the staff
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37. Internal responsibilities
• Does your marketing executive have a clear job description?
• Social media is a full time job!
- What are your target audience saying about you?
- Several major social media platforms to monitor plus smaller
ones your audience may be using
- Researching and generating ideas for content
- Engaging with your audience
- Finding followers / new connections
- Online networking
- Integrating social media with other marketing activity
- Is your marketing executive communicating with employees who
are managing your other marketing channels?
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38. Internal processes
• Is there time blocked out in your schedule for social?
• Do you have a power hour where you can brainstorm with
colleagues?
• Do you have a strategy and content plan?
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39. Having a strategic plan
• In order to build up a loyal audience that will engage and ultimately buy
from you, your marketing team needs to have a social media strategy.
By having a weekly/monthly/quarterly plan, you can
a) Ensure that you send out a deliberate, consistent message across all your social
media platforms and that new content builds on what was previously posted (e.g.
a series of blog articles).
b) Plan ahead for local events e.g. If your busiest time is Easter, you may need to
start planning and executing the build-up from before January.
c) Regularly check that all efforts are leading towards its desired objectives.
d) Have content prepared in advance without struggling at the last minute to think of
something to say.
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40. What a strategy should include
• Key message to get across
• Will there be a personal brand as well as a corporate brand?
• Who is responsible
• Job description for those implementing the campaign
• Which platforms to focus on
• Who to target, who to follow and connect with
• Driving traffic and engagement
• How to “capture” clients / subscribers
• Guidelines on posting - ratio of educational to promotional posts
• Technology to use e.g. Facebook apps, smartphone apps
• Frequency of posting and response times
• Where will you source content from?
• Content plan
• How social will be integrated with other marketing activity
• Social media guidelines for staff
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41. Do you have a strategy for driving
traffic to your social media channels?
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42. Having a content plan
• The content plan can be monthly, weekly or even daily. By using
tools such as Hootsuite, companies can schedule updates on
Facebook and Twitter weeks or months ahead. A content plan
should include:
• A table summarizing what content should go on each media platform
daily/weekly/monthly
• A main theme that will be promoted in different ways across the various
platforms
• Secondary themes that will help keep content varied
• A detailed plan to promote key local events or promotions in plenty of
time before they actually take place, in order to drum up interest
• Details of any specific client group to be targeted and engaged with in a
given period
• The goals the firm wants to achieve in each stated period e.g. 20%
increase in web traffic from social, 30% increase in conversion rate.
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43. Sample content plan
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44. Setting Objectives and KPIs
• It’s commonly assumed that you can’t set up a KPI for social
media because of the difficulty in linking activity with leads. In
fact, there are several ways you can measure leads. And there
are many other functions of social media that can be directly
measured as well, and which are part of the sales process:
• If you want to measure brand awareness, you need to look at page
impressions, frequency of visits and reach. Who’s receiving its
messages and how far are the messages spreading? Don’t get
obsessed with superficial elements such as ‘likes’ and number of
followers alone.
• When building brand engagement, look at retweets, comments, replies,
shares, and likes. How often are people participating in discussions or
talking about the brand?
• When measuring website traffic, which URLs are shared and clicked on
and which website visits lead to conversions?
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45. Metrics
• LinkedIn offers detailed stats for company pages, groups and
your personal profile. Results include seniority, industry,
function, region and company size. In particular, your profile
page stats show exactly who has viewed your profile during the
last 90 days (although you will need to have the premium
package to view this).
• LinkedIn Signal can be used to measure the number of
people talking about a company or its products. You can see
who is talking and what industries they are coming from.
• Google Analytics measures how many visitors have come
from your social channels and what the conversion rate is
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46. Tools for managing and monitoring
social media
• www.Hootsuite.com Schedule updates from all the main social media
platforms. Monitor the volume of discussions on Twitter, Facebook and
LinkedIn that contain specific keywords or phrases. Also produces
customised reports detailing a company’s social influence, reach and
engagement. These can include charts and graphs
• www.radian6.com is a monitoring tool that enables companies to track
their influence on all digital media, giving detailed stats. A company can
track clients or anyone else talking about their products on websites,
blogs, forums, video sharing sites etc
• www.klout.com enables you to measure you social influence. The score
goes up as you reach larger audiences and as their interaction
increases. A receptive audience is more likely to make a purchase.
• www.google.com/alerts to notify you about relevant content on the web
• www.google.com/reader to stay abreast of what is being said in
relevant publications
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47. Hootsuite enables you to manage
multiple platforms
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48. Use Hootsuite to schedule tweets
directly from any article
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49. Using Hootsuite to monitor keywords,
phrases or hashtags
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50. Hootsuite can also run off reports
about your activity
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51. Google Alerts will notify you on all
the relevant stories
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52. Google Reader enables you to read
your favourite publications on one
page
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53. Monitor how much of your content
is being shared
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54. Do you have a social media policy
for your staff?
• Tone to be used (serious/playful/non-aggressive etc)
• Frequency of posts
• Percentages of posts that are (a) informative (b) educational (c) interactive (d) sales
related
• Where to source content from and keywords to track.e.g. Google Rader and Google
Alerts
• How, and how quickly, clients’ complaints are to be responded to
• When, if ever, it is acceptable to refer to business matters on a personal account and
vice versa. Is it enough for an employee to use a disclaimer stating that their views
are their own?
• Infringement of copyright – what material can employees post from elsewhere?
• Avoiding conflicts of interest
• Rectifying mistakes
• Disclosing confidential information
• Not damaging the reputation of the employer or their clients, partners, and suppliers
Examples to follow:
• http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html
• http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/social-networking-guidelines
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55. Future trends?
• Gradual move away from PCs to mobile and handheld devices as 4G
network grows
• Social media increasingly used on the move
• Social media on mobile devices have location based functionality
• As a result, social media become increasingly localised e.g.Facebook
mobile search results bring up local businesses
• Users are becoming increasingly wary of who they connect with and
what they share online due to privacy concerns e.g. employment
• Private networks such as Yammer and Communispace will become
increasingly valuable
• Google+ monopoply of search will enable them to to erode Facebook
and Twitter’s domination of social
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