While the social media world has never been bigger—and has never been a better place to market your business—it can be difficult to keep track of everything that's being said about your law firm in the social media sphere.  If you're worried about what people are saying about you, or if you just want to make sure that your customer service is going the extra mile, you need to start monitoring social media traffic to check out your firm's reputation in real time.  This guide will start you on the right path to monitoring social media effectively and efficiently.

#1: Designate Someone At Your Firm

Often, law firms start by planning to monitor social media and other online communications for mentions of their firm, but these plans never really come to fruition.  Why?  Because no one's specifically designated as the person who will monitor social media communications.  Everyone at your law firm may be wearing so many hats that it's easy for an additional responsibility to slip past and end up simply falling by the wayside.

Instead of just letting social media monitoring be done by whoever has a bit of free time, make sure that you're designating a member of your marketing team (or, if you're a smaller firm, one of your staff members) to keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking websites.  Having one person designated as your expert, rather than keeping the responsibility rotating among several people, will ensure that you end up with a staff expert on reputation management in the social media world.  Make sure that your social media monitoring guru isn't an intern or a temp—the person monitoring will develop significant understanding and knowledge over time, and you're losing out on serious opportunities by having that person leave every few months.

#2: Know Social Media Platforms

You wouldn't try to monitor court filings without understanding the legal language behind them, and in the same way, it's impossible to successfully monitor social networking traffic if you're not educated about what social networks do and how they work.  Your designated staff person for monitoring social media should have a better than average understanding of the subtleties of different social media platforms.

If you don't already have a staff member who has this understanding and don't want to (or can't afford to) hire another marketing person to handle your social media strategy, you may want to either hire a consulting firm that specializes in social media monitoring or have one of your existing staff members study up on social networking and social media topics.

#3: Use Third-Party Software To Save Time

While many businesses start their foray into social media monitoring by doing Google searches for their company name or searching for Twitter hashtags having to do with their firm, this is far from the most efficient way to find out what clients and others are saying about you online.  Today, dozens of third-party applications have been developed to help you keep an eye on social media and your brand's reputation on major social networking websites.

The social media dashboard that you choose should include several features.  First of all, all social media dashboards allow you to check several different social networks at the same time, but you'll want to make sure that whatever software you choose is capable of monitoring the networks where you know most of the conversation is occurring about your company.  Second, you'll want to choose a dashboard with an interface that works well and seems intuitive to you.  You'll also want to make sure that the software you choose is from a reputable vendor without extensive security issues.

#4: Take Time To Understand Complaints and Issues

If you're doing social media monitoring, the worst thing that you can do is dismiss complaints and negative reviews when you see them.  The second worst thing you can do is to act defensive and like your firm can never do anything wrong.  This kind of behavior will only lead to peeved potential clients and a tarnished overall reputation.  Some complaints won't be fair—but others will be, and you will always do a better job monitoring and maintaining your online reputation when you're honest with yourself about where you could be doing better.

#5: Don't Add Fuel to the Fire

When people make a complaint or review your firm in a negative light, it's important not to immediately attack the critic.  It's also critical for you to avoid the kinds of actions that generate what is known as the “Streisand effect,” in which trying to shut down discussion has the exact opposite effect.  Trying to shut down your online critics or silence them will often just lead to them becoming more vitriolic and getting more people on their side because of your perceived censorship.  Unless a comment is actually defamatory, don't try to cajole people into taking down a negative review.

#6: Don't Hover Too Much

If you're checking your social media reputation constantly, it can get tempting to reply to nearly everything you see written about you.  Just the same, think about how you'd feel about a company that seemed to butt in every time people wanted to say anything about it, good or bad.  Odds are that you'd find it a little bit obnoxious—and potential clients might, too.  Sometimes it's better to listen than to talk, and you can often do better by only responding when it's really necessary.

#7: Monitor Social Media Channels Frequently

It's not enough just to check what people are saying about you every couple of weeks or once a month.  The internet lets information spread faster than ever before in human history, and a week or two can be an eternity in internet time, especially if a rumor has begun to spiral out of control.  Keep an eye on your social media mentions on a daily or near daily basis, so that you have the best chance of stopping negative stories before they go viral, while also being able to respond quickly and politely to complaints and negative publicity.

One of the hardest things to get used to about the internet is how fast things can change.  What might have been helpful as a strategy for law firm marketing several years ago can now be counterproductive.  An unfortunate side effect of these fast changes is that many attorneys who were quite well equipped to handle the web of 2008 are deeply mired in bad habits now that it's 2013, with 2014 on the way soon.  In this guide, we'll explore seven habits of highly ineffective legal marketers—and how you can make yourself more marketable by breaking them.

#1: Hovering In Social Media Discussions

One of the biggest social media debacles in recent memory happened to a Phoenix bakery called Amy's.  After a disastrous showing on a television show, Amy's social media pages were bombarded by internet commenters eager to get their jollies by kicking a company when it was down.  The smart thing to do would have been to shut down comments for a short time, until the publicity had died down, and then moderate comments heavily that seemed to come from unhelpful internet “trolls.”  However, Amy's didn't make the smart decision.

Instead, they hovered over discussions, making rude and often profane comments even to people who had made relatively innocuous statements.  Obviously, Amy's is an extreme example, but it goes to show that you can definitely talk too much to dissatisfied customers online.  You won't look good to others when you hover over discussions, whether they're positive or negative.  While it's good to step in and correct misconceptions if they're major, there's no need to stop people from discussing your law firm by taking over every conversation somebody starts about it.

#2: Inconsistent Blog Updates

If you're looking for a fast way to lose followers and make sure that no one reads your blog, just update it incredibly inconsistently—a few posts here, followed by months of silence, followed by a post apologizing for the months of silence and then another few weeks of silence after that ought to do it.  This kind of posting frequency commonly happens when someone starts a blog with a good idea, but hasn't thought through what kinds of topics might sustain that blog through the next several months.

You should maintain several blog posts in reserve so that you can trickle them out at a steady pace, instead of just waiting for inspiration to hit.  Make sure that you're reading other people's blogs, which can often give you the germ of an idea for an entry of your own.

#3: Intrusive Video and Audio

It's one of the most annoying things on the internet: you're looking for something, minding your own business, and when you open up a website—BAM!—you're accosted with a music file playing loudly, or a video of someone introducing themselves to you or asking if they can help you.  You want to help your clients, not give them heart attacks.  Leave the intrusive audio and video to other law firms, whose websites will get closed fast.  No one wants to take the time to look for a mute button, when it's just so easy to open a different website instead.

#4: Negative Responses to Criticism

Even if you're not as bad as Amy's, one of the biggest wrong moves you may be making is to respond negatively to criticism—for instance, by shrugging it off or thinking that a person who wrote a bad review is just crazy.

This may be the easiest habit on this list to fall into.  It's easy to believe that when people make harsh critiques, they're just being needlessly cruel, and it's possible that this could be the case sometimes.  However, all too often, criticisms are legitimate and ignored by places of business that could have fixed a problem and instead choose to bury their head in the sand.  Be the kind of law firm that recognizes when it has messed up, not the kind that ignores client relations issues until your reputation is thoroughly tarnished.

#5: Fear of New Websites

Just because a website generated great returns for you a few years ago doesn't mean that your strategy is still working.  You should periodically make sure to check whether you're now wasting money on advertising with websites that aren't generating any returns for your business.  Don't be afraid to look at new trends and advertising on websites and social networks that were opened recently.  Often, getting in on the ground floor can be a relatively inexpensive way to enhance your marketing reach.  Not everything will pan out, but by making sure that you're diversifying your advertising presence, you'll find some new places for your marketing roots to take hold.

#6: Adopting Every New Trend

While it's important not to be afraid of the new, it's just as important not to waste your time chasing after a dozen different marketing strategies for a dozen different new trendy sites.  Stake your claim, make your choices, and don't try to be on every social network because there's simply no way that you have time to do all of them justice.  Pick three or four main places for your social media presence to be felt, and stick to those places—larger firms can go with more, but for small firms and solos, four is about the limit before you'll start having to outsource your content, which presents problems of its own.

#7: Outsourcing Ideas and Content

Some attorneys got into the habit of having other companies write content for their law firm during the age of keyword SEO.  While search engine optimization still exists today, it's now more based in building quality backlinks and having content that is useful to real human readers.  Those kinds of tasks are best accomplished by marketing personnel at your law firm, not by people who are working on dozens of different accounts.  In house marketing allows you to be more flexible and responsive to client needs and discussions.

So you're getting a large number of hits on your website, but even though people seem to be arriving, they're not staying for long enough to do what you want them to do: sign up for a consultation or a phone call.  If you're looking for better conversion rates—and in today's competitive legal services market, you're in good company—you need this guide.  Keep reading to find out how you can turn your website from one that just brings people in for a moment to one that gets you new business and a better bottom line.

#1: Start With Great Targeting

While one of the reasons for a low conversion rate can be a website that just doesn't pop, another reason may be that you're actually targeting too wide of an audience range with your advertising and marketing.  A number of people may be visiting your website who really aren't able to be serviced by your firm.  For example, if your law firm is in a city that shares a name with cities in several different states, you should make sure that you're excluding any searchers using keywords relating to those other states from seeing your targeted advertisements.

Reducing the number of people you show your website to, while making sure that the right people are being targeted, can actually lead to a significant climb in your overall new business numbers in addition to your conversion rates.

#2: Do A/B Testing—One Size Doesn't Fit All

If you're really serious about increasing your conversion rates and you have several ideas about how you might accomplish this, don't settle for just using one idea—instead, test them side by side.  Modern analytics tools allow you more freedom than ever to compare two different marketing techniques and see for yourself which one works best.

If you're not doing A/B testing, then really you're just making educated guesses about your marketing strategy—and those guesses can easily backfire.  Thorough, single variable testing (in which you change one element at a time, so that you can more easily pinpoint what works and what doesn't) is the fastest and best way to improve your marketing strategy over the long term.

#3: Consider Niche Sites and Microsites

One of the best ways to ensure that you're only getting the kinds of site visitors whose needs you can meet is to split your site up.  In addition to having a main law firm website that shows all of your practice areas, you can also create niche sites with descriptive, long titles that direct exactly the kinds of clients you want to the site. 

Microsites can have places for clients to go back to your main website, but they should contain enough information that a client could feel comfortable calling for a consultation just because of reading the microsite's content.  Don't make your microsite feel so uncomfortably small that people still have more questions than answers.

#4: Use Professionally Produced Video

If you're considering adding video to your website, beware the curse of amateur production values.  While a professionally produced, well done video can make conversions more likely, an amateurish video with harsh sound and low resolution will sink you just as quickly.

Any time you use video on your website, you should hire a production company that will take care of the technical details for you, and you may want to consider hiring an agency to help you write the scripts for your videos.  Without an experienced scriptwriter helping you to work on your video scripts, they may seem undirected or like they take too long for the amount of information given.

#5: Keep Your Website Updated

Many attorneys don't realize that their website will be higher in search rankings and will draw more people in when it's updated frequently.  Today, Google and Bing searches take your website's most recent updates into account when deciding whether to rank your site higher or lower than other websites with a similar reputation.

This is an easy way to get ahead of your competition, who may not yet be in the habit of frequent updates.  Try to make sure that your site is being updated once a week—twice a month at least.  Have planned updates, so that you're not caught without inspiration and with nothing to post.

#6: Have a Great Mobile Site

One of the fastest ways to lose potential clients and raise your bounce rate is to have a website that breaks when people try to look at it with an Android or iOS device.  A good mobile website that allows access to your full site (which should still look good on a smartphone) while putting the most commonly used site functions at a smartphone user's fingertips is critical to increasing your conversion rates.

Studies have shown that clients who are already looking on their mobile phone are more likely than those looking on their desktop or laptop PCs to call an attorney right away.  Make sure your phone number is clearly listed on your website in text, not an image, which will allow people to click the number in order to call you.

You should also make sure that your mobile site doesn't require a great deal of downloaded data.  When a website takes a long time to load, people will tend to click away and visit a different site.  By making a fast-loading, streamlined website, you'll give yourself the best chance of pulling in clients through a mobile website.

#7: Know Who Your Client Base Is

If you're planning to do marketing with good conversion rates, you need to know who's most likely to convert from your website.  That means doing good market research to determine who your most likely clients are and which clients are most likely to find you through your website.  By knowing who your ideal client is, you give yourself a better base profile to start your targeted marketing and ads.

When you're trying to differentiate yourself in the legal market today, one of the best ways is to have truly stellar customer service.  Giving clients a uniquely good customer experience will ensure that you'll have plenty of good reviews and will build new business through word of mouth and referrals.  In this guide, we'll explore seven contemporary best practices for building a consumer oriented law firm.  While implementing these practices may not always be easy—especially if you're deeply entrenched in a law firm culture that feels toxic to clients or staff—they will pay off over the long term.

#1: Friendly Service At Every Desk

One of the mistakes that attorneys can sometimes make about customer service has to do with who needs customer service skills.  It's not just your attorneys who need to understand how to interact professionally and courteously with clients.  Every secretary and paralegal in your firm needs to have a positive, customer focused attitude that matches the overall client orientation that your law firm is trying to project.

All too often, even if an attorney's customer service is great, a bad customer service experience with other people in your firm's office can sour a client's experience.  Attorneys should make sure that they're not trying to save money by paying less and hiring inexperienced people or those with less than stellar customer service skills.  If an inexperienced person causes a client to walk away, you'll have lost a lot more money than if you'd hired someone who was skilled with clients to begin with.

#2: Keep Staff Morale High

Part of making sure that your clients are getting the best possible service is making sure that your staff is kept happy.  An overworked staff is not going to be as competent at handling clients as one that is well rested and maintains a good work life balance.

While staff morale won't always be perfect, it's also important to foster an environment that encourages good communication.  This ensures that small issues in office politics won't become large issues that threaten the overall morale or cohesion of your law firm.  Keep communication channels open from partners to staff members so that there are no big surprises.  When people feel they are informed and kept in the loop, they'll be more likely to present the kind of customer service attitudes you want your clients to see.

#3: Don't Play Hard to Get

There's never an excuse to get far behind on your calls and emails.  Clients can easily become alienated by attorneys who take forever to get back to them, and you're unlikely to receive positive reviews from clients who felt like it was an uphill battle just to get you to take their calls.  The best way to make sure that you're customer focused, more than any other single piece of advice, is to take calls as often as possible and return emails within a reasonable timeframe.

Typically, you should aim to respond to most calls and emails on the same day that you receive them.  While some responses—especially to questions asked toward the end of the day—may take until the next business day, there's no reason that you should ever wait longer than one extra day to respond.  If the question is going to require research that may take some time, you still need to respond to inform the client that you are doing the research, that they have not been forgotten, and that you will get back to them as soon as you have an answer to their query.

#4: Get Involved In Community Events

Another way to help yourself build a reputation in the community—a reputation that will help cement your brand as a client focused law firm—is to make yourself visible as a community leader.  Involve yourself in some charitable causes and sponsor community events and teams.  You may also want to make yourself available to give talks on areas of the law you're an expert in.

By becoming a visible presence around your town or neighborhood, you give yourself added name recognition.  In some situations, it can be substantially less expensive to get your name into the public consciousness this way than through traditional forms of advertising.  What's more, this kind of community involvement gives you clearer name recognition than just putting your name and face on public transit or in the Yellow Pages.

This is a particularly good way to get clients if you're working in a rural area or have a practice that depends on large numbers of older clients.  This can mean that many online marketing ideas won't really bring in the clients you're depending on, and offline measures become critically important.

#5: Work Pro Bono Cases

While you can't do everything for free or take cases without regard for a client's ability to pay, you should always be thinking about whether a case may be worth taking on a pro bono basis.  Pro bono cases should usually be the kinds of case that will stretch and push you without pushing so far that they're beyond your ability level.  You should consider taking cases pro bono if you believe that they may help you make a name for yourself in the local legal community.

Keep in mind that just because a case will attract a lot of publicity doesn't mean you're obligated to take it on a pro bono basis.  Ask a trusted mentor for advice about taking a case if you're worried it's too far outside your wheelhouse.

#6: Responsive Social Media Channels

When you're using social networking websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, you should make sure that you're keeping an eye on your firm's name and any relevant hashtags to make sure that if you're being talked about, you know what's being said.  You shouldn't always interfere—for example, if people are giving you compliments, it's often better to just stay out of it—but you should make sure that you're always listening.  If someone has a complaint or a question, feel free to respond to it in a positive, constructive manner.  This will give you a better online reputation and make it more likely that people seeing your social media presence will want to hire you.

Every year, there are new marketing trends advertised to attorneys from a huge number of online marketing firms.  However, some of these marketing firms will push just about any next big new thing, without much regard for whether the specific advice they're giving applies very well to attorneys.  While lawyers can in some ways do online marketing like anyone else, there are things they should be careful to avoid as well.  This guide will explore some of the bandwagons that you'd be wise not to jump on as you make your marketing plans for the remainder of 2013.

#1: Parallax Design

Recently, some websites have begun playing with a kind of design called parallax design, in which background elements move at a slower rate than foreground text.  While this design can look quite elegant in some contexts, law firm websites should avoid parallax design at all costs.

Why?  Because when people are looking for an attorney, they generally don't care as much about the design of your website as they do about the content that's on it.  Typically, parallax websites are best for sites with infographics and a great deal of visual content that isn't text, while most law firm websites rely primarily on text and video based content that won't work well with a parallax design.  Additionally, because so many designers have started to use it at once, it's very likely that the slightly distracting parallax design fad is destined to be just that—a short term fad.  You don't want your site to look dated in a year because you hopped on the bandwagon too early.

#2: Auto-Playing Videos

With the proliferation of cheap hosting and cheap video editing software, many law firms have begun to rely on video for some portions of their website.  Video's a great idea, and many studies have shown that conversion rates can as much as double or triple when video is added to a law firm website.  However, this doesn't mean that all videos are created equal.

One of the worst forms of video you can use is the auto-playing video.  These videos are annoying, often starting loud audio tracks right when someone clicks onto your website.  It's doubly bad for attorneys, because lawyers are often dealing with relatively sensitive topics.  You're not likely to get someone's business if you're a divorce attorney whose website suddenly starts blaring about divorce when a husband or wife is quietly trying to research the divorce process.  Make your website viewable even for people who need it to be discreet and quiet—that means keeping the videos opt-in, rather than playing them for every passerby.

#3: Cloud Based Storage

More and more storage is moving off hard drives and into the “cloud.”  What this means in practice is that your data is somewhere that you aren't.  While this may not be terrible for many businesses, it's probably not a good idea for attorneys to keep a great deal of their information cloud-based.  That's because cloud systems present issues with both downtime and security that can't be fully mitigated yet.  If you're working on a website for your law firm and do choose to upload things into the cloud, make sure you're using secure services and that you have backup copies of everything on physical hard drives in your physical location.

#4: Retargeting and Remarketing

One of the biggest trends in marketing for 2013 is retargeting and remarketing—advertising to people who've already left your website.  While many retailers have had good luck with retargeting, which targets ads at people who've recently visited your site, and remarketing, which emails reminders to people who didn't complete a form or transaction on a website, these services are more likely to seem invasive and intrusive when they come from an attorney.  Because legal services are often so deeply personal, these strategies can seem like a good idea and be perfectly well meaning, but result in dissatisfaction from potential clients or even people telling those they know to stay away.

#5: Zombie Twitter Accounts

While having a Twitter account is a great idea, too many attorneys today have Twitter feeds that are clearly run by third-party sources rather than being written by the lawyers themselves.  These third party tweets often look almost nonsensical and are clearly designed more for Google's search robots than they are for human eyes.

While getting search rankings through zombie Twitter accounts may sound like a good idea initially and may even give you a brief boost to your rank, but Google is starting to catch on.  Given the ways that Google has diminished the search rank of websites engaging in other types of shortcuts to search rank, it seems likely that the search engine will soon sandbox websites that are seen to be using fake Twitter accounts and fake Twitter followers as a primary means of gaining link juice.

#6: QR Codes

These codes, which appear as a black and white pixellated box, were all the rage for a brief time in 2010 and 2011, but if you're still considering QR codes in 2013, you need to figure out something different to use instead.  Mobile content is developing fast, but the QR code never really caught on because it's nearly as easy to simply enter in a web address instead of having it encoded in the black and white box.

Instead of QR codes, make sure that you have a mobile friendly website or version of your website for people who are using smartphones.  QR codes are, at this point, unlikely to generate significant conversion rates for your law firm and will just be a time-consuming boondoggle for most attorneys who attempt to use them.

#7: Outsourcing Content

Don't outsource your blogs or other legal content to third parties.  No one knows your firm or your practice area like you do, and odds are that outsourcers aren't paying enough to land people with J.D.s and extensive experience.  It takes a little time to write your own content, and you may want someone else to edit it, but there's simply no excuse for having someone else develop your content from whole cloth.  If you don't want to sound like somebody else, be yourself.

Today, there are more hungry young attorneys than ever competing for just about the same number of clients as there have always been.  What's more, cut-rate legal service offerings have made it so that many firms that used to be able to skate by are now hurting badly.  You need to mix it up and offer something different from your competition in order to make people come to your firm instead of someone else's.  In this guide, we'll explore 6 ways to make sure that people see your firm as the best of the bunch when they do their online research.

#1: Start Posting Prices

One of the things that makes people anxious and afraid to contact an attorney is the idea that lawyers charge so much that only rich people can afford their services.  Some potential clients—who might very well be able to pay your fee, especially with a payment plan—may avoid calling because they don't want to be embarrassed by hearing a quoted price in person that far exceeds their ability to pay.  Many people are hesitant to “waste your time” by going in for a consultation unless they're sure that they will be able to afford legal services from your law firm.

That's why one easy way to make sure that you're staying competitive is to get real with your clients before they even call—by using your website to post flat fees.  If your firm does flat fee structures, you can post how much typical flat fees are for different types of cases.  If you charge by the hour, you can give a range of hourly charges and a range of usual billable hours for different types of cases.  By posting prices, you ensure that people aren't coming in who have no ability to pay your fees, while also making other people realize that competent legal help is more affordable and in reach than they may have anticipated.

#2: Go After Ratings and Rankings

The majority of potential legal clients who use online searches to find an attorney check out rating and review websites before they decide on a lawyer to call for a consultation.  That means that ratings and rankings can make or break law firms, especially newer firms or struggling ones.  Great ratings and rankings can give you a significant edge on your competitors, while lackluster rankings and poor reviews will mean a precipitous decline in the amount of new business you see walking in your door.

Getting the best rankings and reviews means taking charge of your own publicity to some extent.  You should ask clients to assess you on these websites when their cases are complete, and keep an eye on whether those reviews are coming in.  If you see a review come in that is obviously not from a client of yours, or is a negative review that you suspect was actually posted by a rival pretending to be a legal client, you can present the evidence for this to the website and, with a bit of luck, get the offending review taken down.

#3: Respond to Leads Sooner, Not Later

When clients start contacting attorneys and trying to set up consultations, it doesn't really matter very much who the best attorney is of the contacted group: very often, the first person to get back in touch with the client will be the lawyer they choose.  This is why it's absolutely critical to respond to leads with all due haste.  It should never take you more than a single business day to get back in touch with a potential client, and calling back within hours will put you ahead of most of your competition easily.

The reason that clients tend to choose the first lawyer to respond is simple.  It's not just that the lawyer gets to give them their first big dose of legal information about their case.  It's also because clients make the assumption that an attorney who takes a long time to respond to their initial call will also be slow in contacting them once they take the case.  Once you have a client, take care not to disappoint them—return their calls quickly, so that they can let their friends know about your dedication to customer service.

#4: Optimize for Local Searches

Many firms are slow to adapt to the newer types of search engine optimization.  For the vast majority of law firms, most of your clients will actually come from people doing searches for locally based search terms.  For example, if you're a family lawyer in Peoria, trying to optimize a web page to show up in the first results for “family lawyer” will be incredibly hard—but trying to optimize both for the “family lawyer” keywords and “Peoria” will be significantly easier.  Keep your search engine optimization local, and you'll be well equipped to get onto Google's first page of search results.

#5: Rethink Your Print and Traditional Ads

While many law firms are still using print media, radio, television, and outdoor (billboard) advertising to market their services, you may want to rethink whether your print and traditional advertising is actually working for you.  The internet is a great way to find attorneys, and studies have shown that the majority of legal clients know this and do their lawyer finding online.  If you're not seeing any clients come in because of your other types of advertising, you may want to consider making the vast majority of your marketing efforts happen in the online rather than the offline world.

#6: Understand the Mobile Web

This is the year that will see, for the first time, more web pages accessed through smartphones and other mobile devices than laptop or desktop PCs.  That means your old website—which looks like garbage when displayed on a smartphone—is no longer going to cut it.  To stay competitive, you need a redesign that incorporates a site either designed expressly for mobile or a site that is responsive to the device it is being viewed on.

As the school year comes to a close, more attorneys than ever are graduating out into the real world.  However, law firm hiring continues to be sluggish, and the class of 2013 is getting into the workforce any way it can.  For some young attorneys, that means that 2013 will be their year to go into practice for themselves.  If you're a new attorney or just new to having your own firm, this guide is for you.  Keep reading to learn how to start a successful firm marketing plan, step by step, using common sense rules that will give you a great reputation for a long time to come.

Step 1: Know the Value of Marketing

When attorneys are just getting started, they often forget to take their marketing costs into account when considering how much money they'll need to spend.  While a typical established law firm spends around 2.5 to 5 percent of gross receipts on marketing, that number won't work for a new law firm.  Why?  For one thing, when you're just starting out, your receipts will be significantly lower, which means that you could underspend on marketing, putting yourself out of business before you or anyone else had really given your firm a fair shake.

As long as you're spending your marketing dollars wisely, they're an investment more than an expense.  Understand that in an oversaturated legal market, you won't get anywhere unless people know you exist.  Smaller and newer firms tend to do better by using relatively new ways to market themselves.  You don't need to use television and radio and billboard/outdoor advertising right away—wait until you're more established.  Online marketing gives you the best bang for your buck on a tight budget in today's legal marketing game.

Step 2: Develop Your Niche and Brand

As a new firm, you're not going to become successful by simply marketing what everyone else is already doing.  You need to have a unique brand that lets you compete in a specific niche.  Consider taking on a new type of case that not many attorneys are taking on in your area.  For instance, rather than just going into bankruptcy law, you could notice that a lot of people in your area are having problems with student loans or foreclosures specifically, and dedicate a significant portion of your practice to specializing in that area of law.

Building a specialized niche allows you to become an expert in an area of law quickly, and if you do your market research beforehand, you can ensure that this niche is one that no other attorneys in your area are already pursuing.  You can also enhance your brand with policies that show that you are dedicated and client focused.

Step 3: Find Your Mentor

When you start a law firm, it's unlikely that you know everything there is to know about the field of law you're planning to practice.  That's why finding a mentor is incredibly important.  When you choose a mentor who is already an expert in your chosen area of law, you can get advice and learn new things in a way that will give you a leg up on your fellow new shingle hangers.

Finding a mentor doesn't have to be difficult.  You can often meet these mentors at continuing legal education classes, or even at law schools.  If there is a practitioner in your area who attracts your admiration, you may want to ask him or her to mentor you.  Mentors can also help you when you've gotten in too deep, giving you a way to soothe hurt feelings or help a client when you're in over your head.
Step 4: Market Your Services

Once you've got your mentor, it's time to actually put your marketing plan to work.  Typically, a new firm in 2013 will want to start online legal marketing by starting up social media profiles and buying targeted keyword advertisements with so-called “long tail” keywords consisting of several words and excluded words.

Include enough in your budget to be able to carry your marketing plans through.  Keep in mind that while the internet gives you a large number of ways to market that use more of your time than your money, you will probably still need to spend some cash on your marketing efforts on a consistent basis.  For example, even if you consider yourself pretty handy with a computer, it's probably best to have professionals put together your website.

Step 5: Know When To Turn Clients Down

One of the biggest things that veteran attorneys say they wish they'd known when they started out is that it's okay to turn clients down when they're asking more of you than you're able to provide.  It's generally better to underpromise and overdeliver than to overpromise and underdeliver, so make sure that your clients don't think you're a miracle worker—unless you actually are one.

If you're in doubt about your abilities, this is where your mentor comes in handy.  Talk to them about situations that are at the edge of what you're able to do.  Your mentor should be able to honestly discuss with you whether the clients are actually beyond your current abilities or whether taking the case would be the right kind of push for your legal career.

Step 6: Get Feedback and Reviews

Especially when you're just starting out, it's critical to learn from your real clients what you're doing right and what could use improvement.  Be ready to actually change based on feedback, even if that feedback leads to results that surprise you.  Have client surveys when you're finishing with someone's case, and request feedback and reviews on attorney review websites.

When you see a consistent comment in feedback or reviews that suggests an aspect of your practice needs significant changes, don't get defensive.  This isn't an insult, it's an opportunity to do better and to make things right.  Consider reaching out to the people who gave you negative feedback, asking them what they might have preferred and incorporating their ideas into the new customer service policies at your firm.  One of the best parts of having a new firm is that without longstanding habits, it's much easier to change course to make things better.

While two out of every three law firms has a Facebook page today, one third are still left behind in the social media game.  Some attorneys seem to think that because Facebook, unlike LinkedIn, is more about personal social connections than business; it isn't really a serious business tool.  This couldn't be further from the truth.  Facebook is the runaway leader in the social networking world, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.  In this guide, we'll take a look at seven different benefits your law firm can get out of your Facebook account.

#1: Building Your Backlink Presence

If you're trying to optimize your website for search engines, today the best move isn't to pack it full of keywords.  You're much better off trying to build backlinks from websites with good reputations.  Google takes backlinks into account as a major component of assessing a website's reputation.  Because Facebook posts are on a very high traffic website, getting backlinks from Facebook pages is a great way to ensure that your law firm's profile on search engines like Google and Bing will be as prominent as possible.

If you're not building backlinks strategically already, you're missing out on significant potential gains to your web presence.  By posting on Facebook consistently and making your posts viral-ready, you will quickly generate the kinds of backlinks that affect search engine rankings most.

#2: Networking With Friends, Colleagues, and Clients

Of course, Facebook is a social network, and it’s most well-known use is as a tool for facilitating networking with a large group of members.  As soon as you create a Facebook account and start creating connections to people you know already, you'll be appearing on other people's feeds—namely, the feeds belonging to your connections' connections.  This gives you a great opportunity to be heard, but not every firm is taking advantage of it.

You should pursue new Facebook connections at every opportunity, which means including easy ways for people to get from your website to your Facebook page and vice versa.  By using Facebook to connect with all the people who are in some way connected with your firm, you can give rise to a vibrant mini-community if you curate your content well enough.

#3: Promoting Your Website Content

For law firms, like for most businesses, one of the best ways to use Facebook is to promote content on your website.  You can get people to look at images, articles, or video on your site by sharing it on Facebook and promoting it to your connections.  However, you should take care with the content that you post on Facebook: if it's not interesting, it may just be ignored and make you seem like dead weight on people's feeds.  This leads to people stopping “liking” your page and a lower number of connections overall.  Offensive content can be an even more direct route to losing subscribers.

Your law firm should post content to Facebook that is fresh, and you should maintain a fairly consistent but not too frequent output.  More than a post a day will get irritating, but less than two posts per week and people might forget you're even part of their subscriptions.

#4: Tuning In To the Zeitgeist

Another advantage that Facebook offers law firms is one that is often overlooked.  It's easy for law firms to get out of touch with what's going on online, and most attorneys don't have time to spend hours every week looking at the latest meme and finding the most relevant news content.  If you use Facebook correctly, you can also use it to keep an eye on the state of the internet.  You'll see the content that people are sharing; the kinds of things they care about and think are worth promoting to their friends and loved ones.

This, in turn, gives you a great head start on figuring out exactly how to tailor your content to what people are interested in now.  People who don't know what good viral content looks like won't be able to create content that goes massively viral—they just won't be tuned in enough to know what works for everyone else, as opposed to what just works for them.

#5: Showing Your Brand Identity

Another aspect of Facebook that some law firms neglect is the branding capability.  By posting content with a conversational, direct brand “voice,” you can implement your branding initiatives in a way that will be seen by more people.  This will make it so that your law firm's brand reputation is better understood, leading to more referrals from current and former clients and other people that you are connected through on Facebook.

#6: Responding Positively To Critics

No business is immune from criticism, and law firms are certainly no exception to this rule.  If you're criticized online and don't have a Facebook presence, you've lost an avenue for discussing the issue that is far more likely to be read than a press release or an interview with a magazine or newspaper.  Facebook is critical for damage control, and allows you to present a polite, calm face even in times of turmoil.

The biggest mistake you can make when responding to critics on Facebook is being negative or defensive.  By presenting yourself as open and honest, you'll be much more likely to get the reactions that you're looking for.

#7: Researching the Competition

When you're on Facebook, you can see how other law firms in your area are handling their social media presence.  If you're clever about competitor research, you can find out a great deal about how your rivals are presenting their brand and where you might be able to be more competitive with them or find a niche different from what they're doing.

Doing research on your competitors doesn't mean you should do as they do.  While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it's also the worst at differentiating your brand identity.

If your law firm, like nearly half of firms today, has a Twitter account, you want to get as many followers as you can.  While there is no sure way to get many Twitter followers all at once, there are some ways to increase the chances that your follower count will be on a steady upswing.  In this guide, we'll look at how to make yourself more visible on Twitter without damaging the reputation of your law firm's brand.

Step 1: Be Yourself—And Don't Let Anyone Else Be You

One of the biggest mistakes that some law firms make when they start a Twitter account is putting it all into someone else's hands.  While it can seem tempting to let an outside firm do all the hard work of your social media postings, the truth is that only you will really be able to sound like you.  When you look at many of the social media accounts generated by legal marketing firms, you'll find that many of these posts go out all at the same time, every day, and are more oriented toward spam keywords than they are toward the brand messages that your firm wants to project.

The best way to make sure that you're putting your best foot forward is to have a Twitter account that is run in-house.  Use your common sense when deciding who to put onto the Twitter account—pick someone who's at the office consistently, who is loyal to your firm, and who can be trusted not to say anything rash or unreasonable.  You should also make sure that you're using secure passwords and accounts, so that no one can imitate you and cause a major faux pas for your firm through their impersonation.

Step 2: Don't Fake Your Followers

While it can be tempting to simply purchase Twitter followers, the truth is that this method is ultimately futile for Twitter users who do it in an attempt to gain real followers and clicks on their links.  Why?  Because all the accounts whose friendship you're purchasing don't really belong to real people with real connections—they're all spambots whose biggest contribution to your firm will be a single digit in your Twitter follower numbers.

Organically developing your audience is, in the end, a more constructive use of your time than seeing how many accounts you can get to follow yours.  Having spam followers doesn't make your firm look like it's full of popular people, it makes it look like you're desperate and taking desperate measures.

Step 3: Make Content of Your Own…

It's important not to just use links from other people when you're posting to your Twitter account.  If all you're doing is posting links about topics relating to the law, and you're just keeping the headline from the original news story, you're just doing the same thing as many other accounts.  There's no particular reason for someone to subscribe to your Twitter account if you're not making anything new.  Even if all that is new is a great, eye-catching headline, you can often snag followers.

You should also make sure that you're posting some content from your own website, generating needed backlinks that will help your search engine performance over time.  You may want to link to blog entries or a repost of press that your law firm has recently received.

Step 4: …But Post Content From Others, Too

While it's good to have your own content, it's rude to have a Twitter account just to toot your own horn.  If you really want to maintain good relationships with the people who follow you on Twitter, you should be reposting their content from time to time and engaging with them by posting their links with a little blurb of your own.

By showing others that you're willing to repost their content, you'll ensure that they become more willing to repost what you have to say.  It's critical to maintain this kind of give and take in social media environments, because otherwise people will think that your social networking is done exclusively for personal gain without any thought for other people—even those closely connected to you through social networks.

Step 5: Respond and Engage in Dialogue

In addition to retweeting content that is created by people whose Twitter accounts you follow, you should also consider commenting on their tweets from time to time, allowing yourself to engage in real dialogues with friends, acquaintances, and professional networking connections.  Don't be stilted when you respond to tweets—maintain a pleasant and conversational tone.  If you decide to use humor, make sure that it's the kind of humor that transmits well over the internet.  Keep in mind that sarcasm may be easy to misinterpret, so you may want to stay away if you want to avoid misunderstandings.

Step 6: Create Viral-Friendly Content

When you create content for your blog or website, once you've got Twitter followers, you should be making that content with virality in mind.  Viral friendly content should inspire people to share—whether it's by being educational, funny, or just by being different from anything that anybody has ever seen.

Ideally, viral content won't take much more than just a quick initial push.  If you're having to re-introduce the content several times and it doesn't seem to be taking off, don't keep trying the same thing over and over again.  Admit to yourself that the content isn't turning out as planned, and create new content instead of engaging in futile attempts to force the old content into virality.

Step 7: Keep Track of Your Twitter Trends

If you want to be building your number of real Twitter followers, you should be keeping track not only of what's trending on Twitter, but why those trends are happening.  By understanding what media Twitter users are viewing and talking about, for instance, you can have a pop culture tie-in post that uses common trending keywords and brings people to your blog or website.

When marketers first realized that they could influence where their website appeared in search engine results, people clamored to figure out the best methods.  Unfortunately, many of those methods created the kind of search engine optimization that users hate: off topic, generic, low information pages that use keyword spam or other tricks to get into the top page of results.  Google changed how it ranked search results in 2012, which made a lot of search engine marketers unhappy.  However, even today, search engine marketing isn't just possible—it's better than ever.  In this guide, we'll look at how to create search engine optimization strategies that work by making your content more tailored to your audience, rather than by trying to outguess Google's spam detectors.

#1: Know Your Audience

One of the biggest things that attorneys need to know when they do law firm search engine optimization is that no firm needs to be at the top of the heap for very generic search terms.  You're never going to crack the top fifty for “lawyer” on Google—and that's okay.  Do you really want everyone in the country who wants a lawyer looking for you if you're a plaintiff's employment law specialist in Knoxville, Tennessee?  Probably not—you want people to come to your website who would actually be interested in your services, not just clicks that won't ever amount to anything.

By knowing what your ideal client is like, you can make sure that you're putting search engine marketing efforts toward getting those kinds of clients.  Knowing your audience ensures that you'll be getting the kinds of clicks you want, without getting those that you don't.  When you do have search engine keywords, make sure that they're specific and clear enough that you're sure to get the people you want to reach.

#2: Make Your Title And Descriptions Clear

If you're trying to get very clever with the title or description of your website, odds are it will just result in confusion for people trying to search for your legal specialty.  If your descriptions are not clear or don't use at least some search keywords that you'd like people to find your site using, you're not going to get the web traffic you've been hoping for.

Why?  Because Google places a great deal of weight on your title, descriptions, and even your URL.  Google assumes that these are the places where you will summarize what's on a page using language that will both attract people to click and draw in the right keyword audiences.

#3: Focus on Local Websites For Backlinks

Many people don't realize that Google actually weights search results higher that have backlinks from other local websites, when people search for local terms.  Why does the search engine work this way?  Showing that you can get backlinks from legitimate local websites in your area shows search engines that you're not just spamming—you're an actual part of your community apart from your keyword marketing.  They reward websites accordingly that are clearly doing things in their local area.

Consider seeing if your local Chamber of Commerce or even your municipality offers a listing service for local businesses.  This can help you get an easy local backlink or two.  You may also want to see if you could partner with other community businesses to build backlinks to each other, forming your own ad hoc affiliation of local businesses—even those as local as your block or street.

#4: Get Rid of Keyword Spam and Bad Backlinks

Keyword spam is so SEO 1.0—you can do so much better with quality content and legitimate backlinking strategies.  If any parts of your website still look like they were written by a machine that sprinkles in keywords, get rid of them.  If you don't, Google may decide that you have a low quality spam website and de-list you or rank you significantly lower than other similar websites.

The same kind of spam detectors are triggered by bad backlinks.  You might know the kind—ones that you pay for, ones that come from comment spam on blogs, or ones that were created through automatic reciprocal backlinking.  These kinds of links are no longer valuable, and can even hurt your website if Google decides to sandbox you.

#5: Add Fresh Content Frequently

If you're letting your website today look exactly the same as it did a year ago, congratulations—you're losing potential clients every single day.  In order for you to stay high in search results for relatively popular terms, even niche terms, you'll want to update your website on a relatively frequent basis.  Even if you're only putting together an update every month or so, it's still much better than letting a website become stale.

Google weights search results on websites that have been recently updated with new, fresh, original content.  If you're only reposting other people's content, search engines notice, and you won't get the same level of boost.  For optimum performance, you should make sure that you're updating on some kind of regular schedule.  Having an onsite blog can make this easier—by creating new blog topics every so often, you'll be updating your site and providing new content for people to search for with every new entry.

#6: Keep Search Pages Updated

When people start searching for you online, they might look at review websites like Yelp or mapping websites like Google Local.  If you want to get business, you need to make sure that you're actually keeping your information on these websites up to date.  If your offices change location, update your location in as many places as possible.  Make sure that you have a description of your business and what you do.  You may even want to try adding some photographs or video to make it easier for people to see what your office looks like and what they can expect if they sign up for a consultation.  All it takes is one piece of out of date information to send potential clients into the offices of your competition.