If you have ever dreamed of a day when you would be able to target your attorney marketing posts on your law firm’s Facebook page so that certain posts appear only to certain segments of your followers, then your dreams have come true. In this edition of Tips and Tricks Tuesday from Attorney Marketing Profits, we’re going to show you what Facebook Page Post Targeting is, and how it can bring a significant boost to your attorney marketing.

If you have never done any paid advertising campaigns on Facebook, you may not be aware of the fact that you can use the characteristics of users’ profiles to target ads to them. For example, if you have a sports management legal practice, and you want to target advertising to people who are involved with professional sports teams, you can tailor your ads to be shown only to people who are employed by or involved with professional sports teams. This ability to target your ads to a very specific niche is a big advantage of using paid ads on Facebook for attorney marketing.

Recently, I wrote about how Facebook allows you to schedule your fan page posts so you can be in court (or on vacation) and still have posts going out to your fans on Facebook. If you didn’t catch it the first time around, you can read that article here. Now, Facebook has revealed a tool for administrators of Facebook business pages that allows attorneys, law firms and other businesses to use characteristics like age, gender or relationship status to target their posts directly to their target market.

You may be wondering, how does that play to your advantage when you are implementing it into your attorney marketing plan?

If you think about it, you will see that you can use a person’s specific characteristics to tailor and select the posts you want to show to them. For example, if you run a legal practice that is focused on divorce law, then you might write certain posts that are tailored towards men and other posts that are tailored towards women. This tool gives you the ability to have the different posts appear in the different genders’ news feeds. You have to admit that their are differences in how the two genders approach certain issues, so why not ensure that your posts are also tailored toward them too? This is only one example, but if you read through this article, watch the video, and also review the images below, but you still have questions on how to use this tool in your law firm or practice, then contact me and I’ll be glad to help you further.

I do not want you to think this is a perfect solution, as I have to confess the Facebook page post targeting is not perfect at this time. The posts will still appear on your page’s timeline as visible to anyone who visits there, so (as always) be careful what you post about and make sure the subject matter is acceptable to anyone who might read it. Additionally, the page post targeting option is only available to pages that have more than 100 fans, so you will need to build your following before you can use it.

Despite some of these limitations, I have to admit that the ability to target your posts to certain groups of your fans is highly appealing to me. It can be a great tool to use in your attorney marketing, especially if you are an attorney in a bigger firm that may have different types of practice areas. Alternatively, you may have a practice that appeals to a specific demographic. This tool will now allow you to target your posts to certain groups of your fans and make it less prominent to those who may not be interested. This should heighten your engagement with your Facebook fans, and in turn, increase the effectiveness of your attorney marketing on Facebook.

I’ve posted some additional images at the end of this article that explain the Facebook page post targeting in a little more detail. These images are courtesy of a blog post on techcrunch.com. If you want to read their entire original post from July 31st, you can do so here.

Finally, don’t forget to watch the video above where I show you exactly how the Facebook page post targeting works in real time. Once you’ve watched that video, you should be able to start using this new tool in your very own attorney marketing plan.

How to Do Facebook Page Post Targeting

Who Can Use Facebook Page Post Targeting

FAQ for Facebook Page Post Targeting for Attorney Marketing

I know many of you took my advice from my blog post last Friday, and you are now using Facebook for your law firm marketing…or at least you’re thinking about starting your Facebook page very soon, right? (wink, wink)

Good news for all of you - Facebook made some changes recently that are very helpful to law firms and other businesses that are using this engaging social media platform in their marketing plan.

Those two changes are:

(1) Facebook now allows the native scheduling of posts for a future date or time; and

(2) Facebook includes different levels of management of its business pages through the admin settings.

For those of you who are Facebook novices, you need to understand that there are two main types of pages in Facebook.  There are personal pages for people who want to share stories, experiences, pictures, etc. about themselves and their personal lives.  And there are Facebook Pagesthat allow businesses, including law firms and attorneys, to promote their business to their clients and customers and interact with them through this unique social media platform.

If you have not used Facebook for any length of time, you may not understand the great joy that I felt when I heard Facebook changed its status update platform to allow updates to be posted at a day or time in the future.  Previously, you had to post updates on your Facebook Page in real time if you were not using a third-party software to handle scheduled postings.

The lack of any scheduling mechanism meant you had to use a calendar, alarm clock, timer or some other mechanism to remind yourself to go into your Facebook page at various times to make postings in Facebook.  I’m sure you can imagine how difficult that would be for someone like me who is not only handling postings for my own business, but for other businesses as well.

How Does Facebook Scheduling Work?

To make a scheduled post on your Facebook Page for your law firm or business, you simply need to go to your timeline and go into the status update box just like before.  Here is what it should look like:

Once you have drafted your post, you should click the clock in the bottom left-hand corner of the status box BEFORE you click the “Post” button.

After you click the clock, you will be given the opportunity to select the date and time for when you want the post to appear on your Facebook page.

I should also point out that if you have only recently set up your Facebook page, and you have not yet entered any dates into your timeline, you will be required to input an event or milestone (e.g. when your business opened) into your business timeline by clicking on the “Event, Milestone +” button.

Once you open the “Milestone” section, you will be able to enter information about an event or milestone in the life of your law firm.

After you have done all this, you simply need to click the “Schedule” button to schedule your post for the date and time you set.

This new feature on Facebook allows you to enter multiple posts on your Facebook page at a time when it is convenient for you, but then also have them scheduled to show up on your page over time, not all at once.  This is important because one of the most important factors involved with effective social media usage is to have regular interactions with your clients or other followers that are spread out over time.

As you monitor Facebook Insightsfor your page, over time you will learn the times of day when your followers are most engaged with your business page, and you can schedule your posts accordingly to obtain the highest engagement possible.

 Facebook Allows Different Levels of Administration

Businesses have always had the ability to assign an “admin” person to handle all aspects of their Facebook pages.  There was only one level of “admin”, however, so any person who was given access to a Facebook page for business had to be trustworthy enough to warrant full access to that page.

With the recent changes, Facebook now gives businesses five different levels of access to its page managers.  The levels of access and a short description of each is as follows (least amount of access first, and each successive level includes access rights of levels below it):

(1) Insights Analyst - an Insights Analyst can monitor insights for Facebook Pages and report to management on activity.

(2) Advertiser - an Advertiser also has the ability to create Facebook ads for the law firm or business.

(3) Moderator - a Moderator also can send messages as the law firm or business and can respond to or delete comments.

(4) Content Creator - a Content Creator has the right to make posts as the business and make edits to the Facebook Page or add applications.

(5) Manager - the Manager has full access to the Facebook Page and can manage the admin roles of other users.

If you spend any amount of time using Facebook in your law firm marketing, you know that management of a law firm’s Facebook Page can be tedious and very time consuming.  For that reason, firms often outsource the management of their Facebook Page to an external consulting company like Attorney Marketing Profits.

The firms that choose to handle the administration of their Facebook Page internally, however, need the ability to assign varying roles to multiple people so they can manage their social media accounts efficiently and effectively.

These two changes by Facebook definitely give law firms and attorneys more flexibility and tools to manage their Facebook accounts.

As such, I give high marks to Facebook for making these changes that benefit law firms in their marketing efforts, and I look forward to hearing your comments and opinions about how you’re using these changes to your advantage.

Shocking Lack of Social Media Use By Attorneys

  I spent Thursday at the State Bar of Texas Annual Meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.

I went there with the intent to pick up some tips and tricks to share with you about attorney marketing while also getting my final few hours of continuing legal education credits. However, I came away from there with the shocking reality that very few attorneys are using social media in their attorney marketing plans.

Picture it - I drove down to Houston yesterday morning; weaved my way through the craziness that is Houston’s traffic; picked the correct entrance from the hundreds of doors into the GRB Convention Center; then registered and ran the gauntlet of sponsor booths to find a seat in one of the large seminar rooms while I awaited the first session.

The first session I attended was in the Adaptable Lawyer Legal Innovation Track that was put on by the Computer and Technology Section. The speaker was an entertaining and informative Michael P. Maslanka, Esq., and he was talking about social media in the workplace.

Mr. Maslanka’s presentation centered around social media from the standpoint of its impact on labor and employment law, in which he discussed issues pertaining to hiring and firing your employees who use social media, how much access employees should have to social media on the job, and social media policies in the workplace.

What was most striking to me, however, was the fact that when Mr. Maslanka (a.k.a. @WorkLawyer on Twitter) and another speaker later in the day asked for a show of hands as to the number of attorneys in the room using Facebook, Twitteror any other social media, the number of attorneys who answered in the affirmative was nearly none.

Seriously?

Yes - it’s true. As shocking as it was, of the hundreds of attorneys in the seminar session yesterday, there were a maximum of 10 (including myself) who raised their hand to indicate they are using social media in any manner with regard to their legal practice.

One of the presenters who had asked the question was as shocked as I was at the resulting lack of hands and blurted out the question - “What are you people doing then?”

That’s exactly what I want to know.

Why Don’t Attorneys Use Facebook in Their Marketing Plan?

Knowing what I know, I can’t come up with a reasonable answer to this question.  I’m hoping some of my colleagues will post comments to this article to give me further insight into their reasoning. Some of the excuses I thought of are as follows:

• Attorneys don’t know how to use Facebook effectively;

• Attorneys think Facebook is only for teenagers and college kids;

• Attorneys don’t think they have anything interesting to say on Facebook.

Whatever the excuses, they pale in comparison to the marketing advantages you can gain if you learn how to use Facebook effectively in your attorney marketing(or any business marketing for that matter).

What Are the Advantages of Using Facebook in Attorney Marketing?

(1) It’s Free

How many of you have purchased what you believe to be a great marketing tool thinking it was going to be the end all and be all for growing your law firm. But in the end it turns out to be a dud or you never learn to use it because it’s too complicated?

One of the key aspects of Facebook, as well as other social media sites, is that you don’t have to pay for it. You simply have to invest some time and effort into understanding how to optimize and use it to your advantage and then commit to doing it.

I’ll be the first to admit that it takes time to use Facebook and other social media effectively, but if you use it, it works!

Worst case scenario - if you set up a Facebook page, but don’t end up using it, you won’t be out any money and you won’t be any worse off than you already are!

(2) “Everyone” Is Using Social Media

You’re probably hearing an echo of your mom or dad in your head saying “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?”

I know the importance of not always following the crowd because I emphasize this to my kids all the time. However, when it comes to using Facebook or other social media to promote your legal practice, the number of users on these social media sites is too enormous to ignore.

As an example, there are approximately 750 million people with a Facebook account, and the total number of users is growing every day.

More importantly, the demographics of these users are not made up of only high school or college kids. In fact, the fastest growing demographic of new Facebook users is baby boomers.

People often ask me whether their “typical client” is the type of person who uses social media. I can’t answer that question for every niche legal practice in this article. However, I can comfortably represent to you that with the number of Facebook users approaching one billion, I believe the odds are very high that there are people using Facebook who are clients of whatever type of law you practice.

And what have you got to lose?

If you never get any leads from social media, which I highly doubt based on my experience, then you still have an effective way to communicate with your clients and the public about what you do, what is happening in your area of legal expertise, and other topics that are of interest to you.

This brings me to the third advantage.

(3) Facebook is a Key Method to Communicate Who You Are

The internet has changed so much from a marketing standpoint over the past 5 years. It used to be sufficient for your law firm to have a website that was informative and static.

You know what I’m talking about - law firms would create a pretty website that showcased the firm’s logo, pictures of its beautiful offices and bios on each of its attorneys. The firm might also have a section entitled “News” or “Press” to communicate what was happening with the firm if they were progressive, but for the most part, websites (and the internet as a whole) was seen as a one-way street for law firms and businesses to market themselves to the world.

The environment has changed due to the prevalence of social media. Today, people have the ability to interact, provide immediate feedback, and get to know you or your law firm through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Local and YouTube. This is why it’s that much more important for attorneys and law firms to understand and use these tools in their attorney marketing plans.

(4) Recommendations/Referrals from Others

Many attorneys tell me that their greatest source of business comes from word-of-mouth referrals from people they know. If this is the case, why not use the tools Facebook provides for you to build a community of people around your business who will be a source of referrals and recommendations for you?

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook, you probably know that much of the activity centers around “Friends” and “Likes”. In effect, these Facebook tools are equivalent to endorsements or referrals from people you know.

When someone friends you on Facebook, they are endorsing you or showing their own Facebook community that they’re willing to be associated with you. Similarly, when they “Like” your law firm or business page, they are explicitly endorsing your because when they take this action, Facebook will notify all their friends about the fact that they “Like” your firm.

In a nutshell, attorney marketing boils down to using the tools available to you to leverage media channels (i.e. TV, radio, newspapers or the Internet) to tell people about your law firm. For those attorneys who are relying only on a static website for their internet marketing, they are missing out on a key (and free) marketing channel that will continue to grow in popularity, and they are missing out on a key source of client leads for their firm.

Next year, my goal is to attend (and speak at) the State Bar of Texas Annual Meeting, and when I ask the question “How many of you are using social media in your legal practice?”….

The entire room will raise their hands!

It’s the only correct response if you’re doing attorney marketing right.

Jury Service - An Attorney’s Perspective

  On Monday, I was called for jury duty in a criminal district court here in Travis County, Texas.

As an attorney and former assistant district attorney, I found jury service to be a fun experience.  Although it pulled me away from my current law practice and local marketing business (including Attorney Marketing Profits) for the day, it provided me with an escape where I could recall the memories of my first legal job from over 15 years ago.

While I have to admit that I did not want to be picked for the jury (as the prosecutor pointed out, nobody really did), I enjoyed the several hours I spent observing the attorneys during voir dire (that’s the legal term for the jury selection process) and how the attorneys’ actions relate to attorney marketing.

You see, I was pretty sure the defense would not choose me to sit on the jury when the prosecutor asked early on in his questioning “Where’s the former prosecutor on the panel?” and I was the one who raised my juror number.

After that happened I relaxed and settled in to observe and take notes on how the attorneys were presenting themselves to the public during the jury selection process.

As an attorney, you may not think of your actions in selecting a jury as an attorney marketing opportunity, but what other situation can you think of where you have a captive audience of approximately 75 people and you’re the only one who gets to talk to them?

The attorneys are one of the main attractions during any jury trial, especially during the jury selection process.  Whether you like it or not, you need to remember that the people who you come into contact with are always making conscious and unconscious judgments about you.

You never know when someone from a jury panel (or anyone you come into contact with on a daily basis for that matter) may be in need of an attorney or may be in a position to recommend an attorney to a friend or family member.  They may not know any other attorneys, and if they recently came into contact with you, they’ll surely remember (and hopefully recommend) you if you made a great impression.

Take it from a fellow attorney and marketing consultant - you must always be marketing!

I don’t want you to go overboard with what I’m saying here and perpetuate the stereotype of lawyers handing out their business cards at the scene of every traffic accident.  It just struck me during my jury service that almost everything we do as attorneys speaks to the public about our law practice as well as our profession.

I am happy to report that the attorneys who made presentations to my jury panel acted very professionally.  I think this is one of the simplest actions you can do, which often gets overlooked when it comes to attorney marketing.  The fact of the matter is that if you act professionally with regard to everything you do in your legal practice, then you shouldn’t have any marketing worries.

Don’t get me wrong - you almost certainly need to do affirmative marketing - such as using a website, videos and social media - to attract new clients and make enough money to keep the lights on.  However, if you don’t take care of the basics like acting professionally toward your clients and others in the public, then I feel confident in stating that any of these external marketing tools won’t help you.