Social media use has become an integral part of almost every law firm but if it’s not used effectively it can drain your time and erode productivity. Fortunately, there are some strategies you can use to improve your social media productivity and effectiveness. With everything to focus on, managing your team, responding to clients on time, developing relationships, and so much more, it’s hard to imagine time to focus on social media. But your presence is just as important online as it is offline. Smokeball uses all of the below to ensure success online

and continues to review their social media strategy to determine success.

Use Analytic Tools

There are a variety of social media analytic tools available for free and at a low-cost.  These tools will help you to measure the effectiveness of your content. Tools such as Google Analytics will allow you to measure the following:

• The number of people visiting a specific webpage. For example, if you use an analytic tool to examine your entire website and will it will tell you which posts get the most visitors.
• The number of shares a social media post received. If you’re posting a lot of social media content, analytic tools that measure the number of shares and likes on specific content months after you’ve posted it are useful. You can see how many people your post has reached after days or even months. You can also see which social media posts are the most popular and on which social media platforms they get the most attention. Most of the social networks once you set up a business account will show you reports on how well your content does.
• Data trends—which posts are getting the most attention via likes, visitors, and shares today compared to last week or last month. This type of information will help you determine what type of content you should create and share on your social media channels.

Once you understand how your audience is engaging your content, you can focus your time and energy only on the content that gets the results you want.

Create A Content Calendar

Generating content ideas can be just as time-consuming as creating content for your web and social media platforms. That’s why content calendars save time and make you more productive.  A content calendar can be as simple as a list of content ideas for each month or week of the year.  Once you’re ready to create the content, all you have to do is go to your content calendar and develop the idea. This is especially helpful if your law firm has multiple people developing content—you can approve content ideas in advance at one time without having to go back and forth with each attorney who wants to write a blog or post something on a social media page.

Create A Process

Even if your law firm is only creating content for a blog and a handful of social media platforms, it’s important to have a written process for how content gets created, approved and posted. Who will write the content? Who will edit the content? Who is responsible for providing images? Which images are appropriate? And who will post that content? Every step in your process should have someone responsible for making sure the process is followed. Once your process is mastered, it can make content creation and dissemination seamless and nearly painless, which is good for everyone’s productivity.

Use Productivity Tools

You can save a significant amount of time by using social media content managers such as Hootsuite to post content across multiple platforms, schedule posts on a calendar, engage with readers, and much more all from one location.  This type of post management tool is especially important if you are managing social media for many accounts. For example, social media content management tools would allow you to post content to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn with only one click without visiting each of those sites separately.

Increasing your social media productivity will give you more time and energy to invest in the work that contributes to your bottom-line.

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Lynn Luong is the Digital Marketing Manager for Smokeball, a case management software that increases productivity and efficiency for solo attorneys  and small law firms to become more profitable.  Lynn has over 8 years of experience in marketing with a focus on digital by developing successful strategies and managing many areas of marketing.