Facebook and Twitter are massive: everyone and their aunts has a social media account, and many of those people use it with regularity (especially the aunts—Gertie, quit poking me, please). Social media can also be leveraged into a method of connecting with prospective clients. Here are some easy techniques to help your firm connect with clients over any type of social media:

Be Social:

What good is social media if you’re not social? If you’re not answering questions, or at least posting regularly, visitors could get the impression that you’ve just abandoned your page. Sharing content and asking open-ended questions can lead to more engagement by giving something for a potential client to respond to.

Most your content can be scheduled to create a steady flow of posts every week, either through the page itself, or through social media management solutions like Hootsuite.

Be Available:

Of course, this applies to every social media outlet, but Facebook is really good about displaying your response time: If you respond to 90% of your messages within 15 minutes for one week, you can get a “Very Responsive to Messages” badge on your page. What attorney doesn’t want to be known as being easy to contact?

If that response rate isn’t feasible, you can also set Facebook to display your response time, ranging from “a few minutes” to “responds in a day”. By default, Facebook will display your average response time.

Tell, Don’t Sell:

While social media and advertising aren’t mutually exclusive, not having a clear line between advertisements and actual interaction may put claimants off. Sharing content that is relevant to your potential clients can be more effective than posts that boil down to “Hey! Hire me!”

A tweet or post that refers to you or your firm may generate less interest than ones about an interesting, relevant story that you had posted a week ago.

Be Clear What Response You’d Like:

It’s not uncommon to see posts saying “Retweet this!” or “Like and Share if you agree!”, and that’s because they work. Salesforce discovered that asking for a response like “Retweet” gained a twelve-fold increase in retweets! It’s amazing what a few imperative words can do.

Get Analytics:

Twitter and Facebook provide analytics for you, and because of this, it’s easy to have your social media schedule planned where you publish the most effective tweet or post, and the most effective time to publish them. What didn’t work at all for engagement one day might do gangbusters the next due to better timing of the post or tweet.

There’s all sorts of ways to engage your clients; however, it’s clear that with social media you can get quite a bit out of small efforts. Whether you’re focusing on Facebook or Twitter, both sites are powerful avenues for connecting with future clients. Even though they do require a bit of elbow grease to get going, they can easily be one of the most common answers to “How did you find your lawyer?”