Getting A Better ROI From Your Law Firm's Social Media Presence

As a lawyer, your time is valuable and obviously, the last thing you want is to waste time during office hours, especially billable hours. However, that's exactly what all too many law firms are doing at the moment. How? Well, there are probably a hundred ways that law firm's waste time, but what we're interested in here today is social media marketing, which has become an increasingly important part of promoting law firms just as it has for nearly every other type of business.
In the last couple of years, law firms of all types have begun to establish a presence on social media and social networking platforms and many firms swear by the efficacy of social media at bringing in new leads and clients as well as helping the firm to keep in touch with current and past clients as well as other firms. All this is well and good, but given all the communications possibilities offered by social media and networking, it is all too common for law firms to go beyond what they need to do to leverage the power of Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks to benefit their site and end up simply wasting time.
If your firm is considering using social media and social networking to promote its services or if you are already doing so and fear that you may be spending more time on these efforts than they are bringing your firm in results, the best thing to do is to step back, take a deep breath and develop a plan for using social media. Your firm doesn't need to be constantly checking and responding to updates from contacts, tweeting every little thing that goes on in the firm non-stop or generally using social media in ways that don't really do much for the business - and of course, neither do you.
Your firm needs to come up with policies for how social media will be used and when; this may be done in consultation with partners (especially any partner in charge of marketing, if your firm has one), paralegals and other staff. You may also need to bring in an outside marketing firm to handle your firm's social media presence - which if you're finding that you or other personnel at your law firm are spending too much time managing your social media marketing, may be a good idea.
No one would argue that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media and social networking platforms are powerful tools which can do quite a bit for law firms; but there is definitely a limit to what any business should expect from them as well as a limit to how much time they should consume in a given work day. Larger firms with the resources to do so may be better off choosing to outsource social media management to a marketing company; but even a small firm may find that in order to get the results they want, they may also need to put things in the hands of professionals.