There’s oh-so-much talk about social media and lawyer marketing. So we decided to get some facts of our own. In our first Attorney at Work Social Media Survey, conducted in December, we asked readers about their social media habits, preferences and attitudes. More than 450 readers responded to the survey, including 340 lawyers (56% female, 44% male), weighing in on their use of social media and their perception of its value.
There were some surprises, of course, along with confirmation of things we knew all along. Of the lawyers responding:
91% said they use social media, and a surprising 60% identified their social media use as part of a marketing strategy.
91% are on LinkedIn, with 73% saying they are on Facebook. Twitter ranked third, with 45% of lawyers prepared to Tweet, and a paltry 21% say they use Google+. Conversely, the lawyers responding said the platform they use most frequently is Facebook with 43%. Only 2% say they most often use Google+.
39% said LinkedIn is the most effective client-getter. In fact, those who say their use of social media is part of an overall marketing strategy actually use Facebook less and LinkedIn far more frequently than those who identify no marketing strategy.
As for return on investment, only 4% said social media is “very responsible” for getting them new clients, while 31% said no social media platform is effective at bringing in new clients.
A significant amount of skepticism remains — 56% of lawyers responding think the talk about lawyers using social media for marketing is “more hype than reality.” Women lawyers are slightly less skeptical than men, with 51% believing the talk is hype.
Which leaves us with a couple of great big questions:
- If social media is part of your marketing strategy but it’s not bringing you new clients, why isn’t it?
- What could you do differently to improve your return on investment in social media?
There may be some clues in a couple of the survey questions to what some users do to make social media more effective:
- 21% of the lawyer survey respondents said they use social media management tools such as Hootsuite, Google Analytics and TweetDeck.
- 22% said someone else (staff member, contractor, etc.) assists them with writing and updating for social media marketing.
Get Your Bonus Social Media Marketing Download
Plenty can be done to ramp up the ROI on your social media activities. If you’re interested in learning about them from the experts, download your free copy of Attorney at Work’s new e-zine, “Connected: A Lawyer’s Guide to Social Media Marketing.” You’ll find 60 pages of great information and tons of links to a whole lot more. Don’t let the social media marketing train leave the station without you! As always, it’s free to anyone who subscribes to Attorney at Work!
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