Category: Legal Technology

How to Get Amazing Attention for Your Firm on Social Media

Human beings are wired for loving the spotlight. When you post something on social media and no one comments or likes, it feels almost like a personal rejection. And when you’re posting to get attention for your business and no one cares what you’re writing, you are wasting your time.

One of the most important ways to get noticed on social media — especially on Twitter — is to make sure your post has a great headline. There are actually very good psychological reasons for using certain words that makes it almost irresistible for people to click. Here are 8 proven formulas to craft your headlines around:

Surprise — using words that surprise or startle captures attention because we love novelty. Words that break the pattern stand out.
Questions — using questions works because a question mark stimulates the human brain to seek an answer.
Curiosity — using incomplete information in your headline to pique curiosity. A famous example of this is the 1926 ad with the headline, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano…but when I started to play…!”
Negatives — using negative superlatives like “worst” or “stop” intrigues us because we want to know if there is something we shouldn’t be doing.
How to — we all want to get better, so using “how to” in your headline makes a promise of improving the reader’s knowledge.
Numbers — because humans dislike uncertainty, we respond well to numbers in headlines.
Reader referencing — using phrases like, “For those who don’t know what to do after a car accident” or just the word “you” are powerful drivers.
Specifics — quantifiable facts and figures that elicit an image in our head are incredibly intriguing.

Here are more than 180 power words to use in your headlines, courtesy of CoSchedule.com:

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Fix These 4 Problems on Your Blog to Maximize Search Engine Optimization

1. Make It Useful

Write about something that will provide value to the person reading it. Write with your audience in mind. Keep the writing simple but professional. Remember: Your clients do not have a law degree and if your writing confuses them, they will look for answers elsewhere.

Think about your client base. Are they middle aged woman, seniors, mostly male, individuals with physical handicaps? Target your posts to their interests, needs and questions. Avoid general articles that could be for anyone. Have the reader in mind when you are writing content and show your expertise. Answer the reader’s unasked questions.

Targeting a specific demographic will help with the social signals as it will probably be shared more and will earn links. Fluff content may get you some rankings for staying relevant and regularly updating your website, but if an actual human goes on your site and does not find value in what you have posted, chances of a return visit are slim—and your ultimate goal should be people returning to your site based on the quality of its content.

2. Make It Local

Think about your local area and any news or hot topics that you can cover in blog updates. Can you add unique value to these stories? The more your topics and writing speak to your local audience, the more engaged they will be with your site. Write about charities or events you are involved in.

3. Engage the Audience

How does the page look? Content is not just words. Content can be text, images, videos, charts, graphics and data. Use video and image assets to help tell your story. Visual content engages the user and instills respect for the quality of the information presented on the page.

Also, long blog posts allow you to fit a lot of good information and keywords onto the page, but you will need to divide it in to short sections or into an FAQ format to enable visitors to scan the page for the information they seek.

Use your employees for feedback. Ask them to share your content. If three months have passed and no one has shared anything, it is time to start asking why.

4. Get the Technical Details Right

Effective title structure is key to generating good organic traffic and a high-quality user experience. Utilizing headings (H1, H2, H3), alt text and description tagging is important for user experience (UX) and for search engines to understand and optimally display your content.

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Tanner Jones

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How to Increase Your Engagement on Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC]

If you’re using Facebook to “sell” your practice, you are probably disappointed in your results. You see, Facebook is about engagement and anything that smacks of a hard-sell is usually tuned out.

You will get much better results if you simply surrender to what Facebook can deliver, which is an opportunity to meet new prospects and to share your knowledge that may someday lead to new business.

A lot of new business connections occur on Facebook based on people you used to know –old high school or college friends that you connect with there and then educate them naturally on what you do now. In that sense, approaching Facebook as a referral source cultivation opportunity could be a mindset that will pay you big dividends in the future.

That said, there are certain things you can do that research shows leads to more engagement with your Facebook posts. This infographic lays that out:

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10 Insights You Want to Gain from Your Social Media Monitoring

If you are participating in social media for your law firm, you should also be monitoring whether or not your time investment is paying dividends.

You should be creating Google Alerts or searching on Social Mention for the name of your law firm and the names of your attorneys at least once a month. Create alerts for the areas of law you practice as well. The social media blog site Buffer recommends you keep these 10 insights in mind when reviewing your results:

Sentiment — Are mentions generally position, neutral or negative?

Questions — Look for questions people may have that you can provide the answers to in your social media posts or blogs.

Feedback — If you see feedback on Avvo or Yelp or some other site that directly affects your firm, you need to listen and respond appropriately.

Links — keep track of who is retweeting or reposting your content and keep track of who is linking back to you.

Pain points — absorb what people are talking about online that is of concern to them and use that information to inform your future posts.

Content — this is where your alerts for your practice area come in handy. Use these to mine for topics of interest to your target market.

Trends — recent court decisions or trending news in your practice area should be included in your posts so it is clear you are on top of all the trends.

Media — journalists spend a lot of time online so pay attention to the areas they are covering that might provide you with an opportunity to reach out as a spokesperson on those subjects.

Influencers — are there certain individuals who keep popping up in your feeds? They may be someone it would be advantageous for you to know as an industry influencer.

Advocates — monitoring is a great way to find and recognize those people who are talking positively about you online.

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Making These 3 Errors in WordPress Makes Your Law Firm’s Blog Less Effective

Here are three common WordPress mistakes that will make your legal website less effective than it should be:

Posting content that is not unique, engaging or well designed. Unstructured information, filler materials and overly general articles do not motivate a user to interact with the site. Your goal should be to create content that users want to share or bookmark or research further by following your in-text links.
Getting caught up in finding the perfect WP template and design. Many inexperienced website authors expend all their energy before even considering content development. A lot of sites use generic content that reads like it was added as an afterthought. It is hard to schedule time to generate good content but when most people say, “Oh, I’ll come back to improve that later,” they never do.
Failing to design each page for its intended purpose. Out-of-the-box WordPress themes use similar forms and sidebars on every page. It is important for the design (as well as the content) to serve the page’s purpose.

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Tanner Jones

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Tips for Growing Your Fan Base on Facebook

One of the biggest challenges for anyone seeking to have a large social media following is growing your audience to a healthy level. Sometimes it almost feels like we’re back in grade school, looking for other kids to like us!

Inbound marketing firm Hubspot has a number of informative presentations on Facebook marketing, but this quick slide guide with five tips on how to grow your audience is particularly useful since it visually walks you through the steps you need to take on your Facebook page to reap the rewards from each tip:

Inbound marketing firm Hubspot has a number of informative presentations on Facebook marketing, but this quick slide guide with five tips on how to grow your audience is particularly useful since it visually walks you through the steps you need to take on your Facebook page to reap the rewards from each tip:

5 Quick Tips For Growing Your Facebook Audience from HubSpot

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Social Media Ethical Guidelines: What Lawyers Need to Know

Don’t let your online activities land you on the bar discipline docket.

The New York State Bar Association’s Commercial and Federal Litigation Section has published a set of Social Media Ethics Guidelines that provide useful guidance for all lawyers (not just New Yorkers) on the use of social media. While the Guidelines set forth a broad outline for dealing with social media, lawyers will still need to think hard about their particular situations. Below are some of the guidelines that lawyers and law firms should keep in mind.

On-Line Advice: What should you do if a Facebook friend posts a legal question? Answer it? Have you created an attorney-client relationship? Do you owe a duty to all of your friend’s Facebook friends who will see that advice and possibly rely on it? The New York Guidelines suggest that you should keep any reply broad and general. “A lawyer may provide general answers to legal questions asked on social media. A lawyer, however, cannot provide specific legal advice on a social media network because a lawyer’s responsive communications may be found to have created an attorney-client relationship and legal advice also may impermissibly disclose information protected by the attorney-client privilege.” (Guideline 2.A). Great social media advice, but the Guidelines do not say when a “general answer” becomes “specific advice.” A good rule of thumb would be – if the request is specific and includes specific information about your friend’s situation – do not answer the question on Facebook.

Advertising: The Guidelines also say that if you use your social media profile primarily for your law business – think LinkedIn – it is subject to the rules governing attorney advertising and solicitation. (Guideline 1.A). When using Twitter to market your practice, the Commentary to the Guidelines says that you may “utilize commonly recognized abbreviations for information that is required in attorney advertisements.” The Guidelines thus suggest that you will need to devote some of your 140 characters to complying with advertising rules, but they don’t say exactly what content would make for a compliant Tweet.

New York’s Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1(f) requires all lawyer advertising to say “attorney advertising.” Presumably, then, attorneys can say “Att’y Ad” or something similar in their Tweets. The Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct do not require “Attorney advertising” but do require that any advertising “include the name of the lawyer, group of lawyers, or firm responsible for its content.” Mass. R. Prof. C. 7.2(d). Thus, Massachusetts lawyers may have a few extra characters in their advertising Tweets than New York lawyers, though they should Tweet under their own names – not a clever screen name.

That said, the Massachusetts rules could still raise compliance issues for lawyers who use social media – particularly concerning Rule 7.3 which governs solicitation of professional employment. For example, the Office of Bar Counsel has previously advised that “bulletin boards, which display information in cyberspace and allow people to post and respond to messages, … do not involve real-time, live interaction between lawyers and prospective clients” and are thus in-bounds for lawyers to advertise and solicit clients. On the other hand, “solicitation through … interactive computer-accessed chat rooms is prohibited as in-person solicitation” where the chat rooms “offer conversation that is live, interactive and conducted in real-time or near real-time.” On this rationale, a lawyer who finds herself in a “real-time” Twitter or Facebook conversation could unwittingly breach Rule 7.3(d) (prohibiting “in person” solicitation).

Among the other useful tips from the New York Guidelines:

If someone posts a statement to your social media profile that does not comply with advertising guidelines, you may have an obligation to remove the post. (Guideline 1.C);
“A lawyer may view the public portion of a person’s social media profile or public posts even if such person is represented by another lawyer,” including in situations where the person’s account tracks the identities of the viewers. (Guideline 3.A);
A lawyer may request permission to view the restricted portion of an unrepresented person’s social media website or profile. However, the lawyer must use her full name and an accurate profile, and she may not create a different or false profile in order to mask her identity.” (Guideline 3.B);
The situation is different if the person is represented. “A lawyer shall not contact a represented person to seek to review the restricted portion of the person’s social media profile unless an express authorization has been furnished by such person.” (Guideline 3.C);
You can advise a client to “take down” a post, although the client may have an obligation to preserve the information removed. (Guideline 4.A).

The Guidelines are not universal, however, and the drafters caution that there are numerous conflicting opinions and rules around the United States. For example, a recent New Hampshire ethics opinion has a different take on Guideline 3.B, finding that a lawyer must disclose her involvement in a matter when sending a “friend” request to an unrepresented witness to view restricted portions of the witness’ profile. “[S]ending a Facebook friend request in-name-only constitutes a misrepresentation by omission, given that the witness might not immediately associate the lawyer’s name with his or her purpose and that, were the witness to make that association, the witness would in all likelihood deny the request.” N.H. Bar Ass’n Ethics Advisory Comm., Op. 2012-13/05.

As you incorporate social media into your practice, you must research the law, understand the capabilities of the social media platforms you use, and carefully consider your online activities in connection with the Rules of Professional Conduct. In Massachusetts, if in doubt, you could contact the Office of Bar Counsel’s ethics hotline and ask. The hotline is available between 2 and 4 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Fridays at (617) 728-8750. Ultimately, your best defense against stepping into a social media ethics landmine is to stop and think before you click.

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Thomas W. Kirchofer

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Sherin and Lodgen LLP

The One SEO Rule You Need to Know About Alt Tags for Images

Wikipedia says alt attributes (alt tags) are used in HTML documents/Web pages “to specify alternative text (alt text) that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered.”

To optimize your website’s content for search, remember one simple rule for image alt tags: An image’s alt attributes should describe the visual. Including keywords in alt tags is a good practice as long as it’s not spammy. Alt attributes used to have a larger SEO impact in Google searches before the company changed its Google Image search design. Traffic has decreased considerably from image search since then.

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Tanner Jones

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