Everything About Facebook Advertising Revenue

Facebook advertising revenues have been steadily increasing ever since the website began implementing ads in 2006.  Today Facebook has over 845 million users, and those users have created an advertising behemoth: currently, Facebook advertising revenue figures are around $3.15 billion per year.  Keep reading to find out more staggering figures about Facebook advertising revenues and how you can make your ads work for you without costing an arm and a leg.

Recent Controversies and Their Effect on Facebook Advertising Revenue

Earlier in 2012, Facebook advertising revenues suffered something of a setback when the company settled a class action civil suit.  The suit pertained to “sponsored stories” appearing in people's news feeds and using photographs of people who had not given explicit permission for their photo to be commercialized in this way.

In spite of having to pay millions of dollars because of the class action suit, overall Facebook advertising revenues are up.  The site currently takes in about $10 of Facebook advertising revenue per user in the United States and Canada, and slightly less than that in other regions globally.

Although some big players have withdrawn their support for Facebook advertising after seeing less than ideal results, this has had little impact on overall Facebook advertising revenues.  Overall, Facebook advertising revenue has actually gone up even as click through rates (CTRs) have declined by about 8 percent over the last year.

Is Facebook Advertising Revenue Really Worth the Time?

Since you now have to pay more to get less, are the Facebook advertising revenues your firm could get really worth it?  You have to ask yourself these questions more and more, particularly if you're not able to see a direct stream of Facebook advertising revenue for your company in the current economy.

Remember that your Facebook advertising revenues may not all be obvious.  Not every client who researches your firm using your Facebook page or by looking at who “likes” you will let you know during their consultation visit.  

The effects of Facebook can be very subtle, and it's best to try to track Facebook advertising revenue from all sources, even if some of that revenue comes from clients who didn't click your direct ads.  Visibility and reach are key to expanding your practice, and you can't necessarily put an easy price tag on building an engaging web presence.

What Law Firms Will See the Biggest Facebook Advertising Revenues?

Before you decide on an advertising budget for your new campaign, you need to ask yourself how much Facebook is really worth to your law firm.  For some types of firms that market primarily to other professionals, Facebook advertising revenues may be minimal compared to what you could bring in using LinkedIn for more professional networking.

If, on the other hand, your law firm's advertising strategies usually rely on B2C marketing, you'll be much more at home on Facebook.  Firms that fulfill the needs of very specific demographics and know what their niche markets look like can do better on Facebook than general practitioners.  If you think that you do most of your business with a particular age group or people with some shared interest, you can make that work for effective, targeted ads that will deliver the best value per click and make your Facebook advertising revenues grow steadily.

How Can I Increase My Facebook Advertising Revenue?

Facebook advertising revenue is likely to be highest for firms that can leverage sponsored stories to their advantage and use landing pages.  Just making these two changes can vastly increase your conversions and overall Facebook advertising revenues.

Landing pages work for any kind of direct pay per click ad, but if you want to have real Facebook advertising revenue with your campaigns, you'll definitely need them to grab social media traffic.  People today want to be able to get through websites and find the information they want quickly.  

If you don't direct visitors to a relevant landing page, you'll be losing out on a lot of traffic and it won't matter what you bid for your clicks—people won't stay long enough to find out that you're a great law firm with great things to offer.  People decide whether they want to talk to you within the first ten seconds of reading the first page they're directed to on your website.  Without landing pages, that first ten seconds will be confusing and potentially frustrating.

The Future of Facebook Advertising Revenues: Mobile Advertising

As of summer 2012, only about half of advertisers are adding to their Facebook advertising revenue by running sponsored stories.  These stories appear in a person's news feed, in the same place where a status update from a friend or a link shared by a colleague might be.  This high-visibility placement is especially effective for generating higher Facebook advertising revenues when you're posting frequently to a blog and can turn those entries into a constant stream of fresh sponsored stories.

If you're not currently optimizing your Facebook ads for mobile marketing, you're missing out on the most lucrative source of Facebook advertising revenue.  Studies have shown that these ads can be up to 11 times more likely to generate click throughs than ads in a desktop browser.

How Can I Tell If I'm Getting a Good Return on Investment?

One of the best ways to tell if your Facebook marketing efforts have really been turning into Facebook advertising revenues is to ask clients to fill out comment cards.  On these comment cards, you can ask where someone researched your firm before deciding to use you as a lawyer.  This way, you'll find out about clients who saw your professional presence on Facebook and used it in their decision-making process.

You may want to ask an outside analytics company to analyze your results if you want to maximize your return on investment and have already tried all of these strategies to increase your Facebook advertising revenues.  The problem with your Facebook advertising revenue stream may be something unusual, and a professional web traffic analyst can help you get your revenues back where you want them from your Facebook pages.

Everything About Facebook Advertising Rates

The most recent Facebook advertising statistics are astonishing: over $5 billion is projected to be spent by businesses on Facebook advertising this year alone.  Perhaps more exciting than this figure is the change from Facebook advertising rates just a few years ago: today's revenues are six times greater than in 2009.  Keep reading this guide to find out more Facebook advertising statistics that can help you evaluate Facebook advertising effectiveness for your firm.

Why Would I Want to Advertise on Facebook?

According to Facebook advertising statistics, the reason that 61 percent of companies buy Facebook advertising is to increase awareness of their brand.  53 percent of companies pay Facebook advertising rates because they want to grow their audience, while just under half—44 percent—use it for direct conversions.

What these Facebook advertising statistics mean is that you don't necessarily need to get direct client referrals from social media in order to measure your Facebook advertising effectiveness.  Even if your Facebook presence is just great for increasing your number of inbound links and helping your search engine optimization, it's doing something great for your firm and you may still want to pay Facebook advertising rates.

One reason to advertise on Facebook, in particular, is that it gives you great tools for targeting your ads.  It's easy to increase Facebook advertising effectiveness by changing the hyper focused demographics that can see your ad copy.

Unlike Google AdWords, you won't have to pay different Facebook advertising rates depending on which keywords you want to advertise.  Instead, you can choose to increase your Facebook advertising effectiveness by picking the exact groups of people most likely to need your legal services.  

Facebook advertising statistics show that the most common criteria for targeting ads are age, location, interests, and connections.  It may surprise you to learn that for most advertisers, Facebook advertising effectiveness is not impacted by gender targeting.  Some attorneys may want to target a specific gender (for instance, child custody attorneys who specialize in father's rights issues), but most have better luck talking to men and women equally.

Some Facebook Advertising Statistics You Need to Know

You can improve your Facebook advertising effectiveness by doing things your competition hasn't yet picked up on.  For example, Facebook advertising rates for targeting specific zip codes can sometimes be significantly cheaper than targeting a broader geographic area, according to recent Facebook advertising statistics.  If your firm works primarily with people from just a few local zip codes, this level of hyper local targeting is statistically likely to be more effective for your advertising.

One place that many advertisers are now falling short is targeting based on connections.  Facebook advertising effectiveness actually increases when you target it toward your fans or the friends of your fans.  It's much more likely that paying Facebook advertising rates will be worth your firm's budget if you are targeting this group—but Facebook advertising statistics show that only about a third of advertisers are even bothering.  Get ahead of the competition by being the first in your area to use this kind of marketing.

Getting Help: Software That Can Make Targeting Easier

According to 2012 Facebook advertising statistics, today only about 15 percent of professionals paying Facebook advertising rates are actually using outside software to help them improve their Facebook advertising effectiveness.  You can install several different tools that will let you take a closer look at how you can generate more narrow audiences based on locations, connections, and demographic features.

Because it's unlikely that your competition is also using this kind of software, you can improve your chances of Facebook advertising effectiveness really simply this way.  You'll usually find that it takes much less time to set up a new split test or otherwise measure the performance of your ads when you're able to use automated targeting to take some of the guesswork out.

Agencies can also help you design split tests and figure out the answers to targeting dilemmas.  While 2/3 of advertisers currently report looking at split tests to decide which ads to run, most are only analyzing their targeting or their ad copy.  Few are even looking at their landing pages to determine whether a particular landing page is impacting how people interact with their website.

A Word About Facebook Advertising Effectiveness

If it isn't new, it's not trending on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.  Facebook advertising statistics show that Facebook advertising effectiveness is highest during the first 72 hours you're running a new ad.  That means that you should be constantly cycling through new images and text, and targeting your advertisements at different demographics.

If you're waiting for a week or longer to change your ad copy, you're paying Facebook advertising rates for nothing.  Changing your copy can have a near-immediate impact on your Facebook advertising effectiveness, and because ad headlines on Facebook are so short it doesn't need to take a long time to make new effective copy.   

Because the life cycle of a Facebook ad can be a matter of just days, you should also feel free to pull underperforming ads quickly rather than seeing if they'll pick up speed—Facebook advertising statistics show that you're better off just using something new.

Should I Be Afraid of Rising Facebook Advertising Rates?

Facebook advertising statistics definitely show that as of now, Facebook advertising rates are increasing.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, because new types of targeted ads are actually making Facebook advertising effectiveness increase too.

Today's Facebook advertising statistics indicate that while it may cost about 50 percent more on a per-impression basis to use mobile sponsored stories than to get an ad into someone's sidebar, they're over 11 times more likely to be clicked on.  11 times—that's a huge increase in Facebook advertising effectiveness, and all for making a relatively small change.

To capitalize on these trends, you'll need to make your landing pages mobile friendly.  If you make your telephone number easily accessible, the easiest way to see your Facebook ads paying off may be watching your lines light up as new clients start calling your office based on mobile advertising.

Everything About LinkedIn Marketing

It's a big step for your law firm to start marketing on LinkedIn, but if you're already one of the 90 percent of attorneys using the website, with a few tweaks you can start getting a real return on investment.  Even the very first steps of profile creation can have a significant impact on your LinkedIn marketing—did you know that without a photo of yourself, you may be losing a third or more of possible networking opportunities?  Keep reading to find out how to make sure your LinkedIn marketing makes your firm prosper and look great.

Marketing on LinkedIn: Making a Profile

LinkedIn marketing begins when you create your profile.  Don't just hurry through profile creation, because your profile is your public face, your first impression that will bring in new connections.  Not all lawyers marketing on LinkedIn are using all of the features of the profile system: statistics show that of the attorneys currently using the website, just over 50 percent have a profile that is at 100 percent completion.

You should always make sure that your LinkedIn profile contains a photo—studies have shown that having a photo of at least your face, rather than a company logo, will increase your LinkedIn marketing success and your ability to generate new connections.  The best photo to use is the same photo that you're using on the attorney bio page on your website—this will help to make sure that the “you” people see in both places is the same, and increase recognition.

In order to have great LinkedIn marketing, you need to go beyond the defaults.  Instead of using your job title as your profile “headline,” consider making a headline that gets into the specifics of what you do and who you are as a lawyer.  Customize your links as well—instead of “My Web Site,” you can use link text that is more descriptive about your firm's homepage or attorney bio page.  Even your LinkedIn URL can be customized so that you can more easily include it on business cards or email correspondence.

Marketing on LinkedIn: Making Connections

When you start using LinkedIn marketing, you'll be asked whether you want to import your Outlook contacts into LinkedIn.  This can be a good idea for quickly populating your contacts list, but you may not want to send additional invites to people who aren't yet part of the site—they could perceive these as spam, and your reputation could suffer as a result.

Once you've added a number of initial connections for marketing on LinkedIn, make sure that when you continue adding people to your network, you're customizing (there's that word again!) your messages.  Sending just the default message sends another, unwritten message to your would-be contact: that you don't want to take the time to address them personally.  Write a quick, heartfelt message and you'll be much more likely to be added to someone's network.

Marketing on LinkedIn: Making Conversions

One of the easiest ways to use LinkedIn marketing to make direct conversions is by using direct ads.  These pay per click advertisements usually cost significantly less than Google AdWords (often in the neighborhood of $3 per click) and will appear only to people with the job titles and geographic locations you select.

In order to make your ads effective, you're going to need to use a lot of the same strategies that you would use for any web sidebar advertisement (like the ones that you can buy with Google AdWords).  You'll want a clear, direct call to action and to make sure that both the ad text and the landing page it links to are highly relevant to the people you are targeting with your ads.

Marketing on LinkedIn: Making Conversations

LinkedIn marketing gives your firm the opportunity not only to talk about your own services, but to talk about new case law, state statutes, and changes to legal technology with colleagues and friends.  By exchanging ideas and creating engaging new content, you can get the most out of your marketing on LinkedIn.

For example, if you have a knack for answering people's questions quickly and eloquently, you should consider trying to answer a few questions on LinkedIn every day or nearly every day.  This kind of contribution reflects well on you and your firm, and can help you to build your reputation with other attorneys and with potential future clients.

Groups are another good way to get a conversation going.  Groups should always be part of your LinkedIn marketing efforts.  Don't directly advertise (you always want to avoid the appearance of spam), but engage in creative ways that show you are helpful and friendly.  Marketing on LinkedIn will most often take the form of networking opportunities with people who can send your firm business through client referrals.

Marketing on LinkedIn: Making Plans for the Future

If you're not using direct ads, your LinkedIn marketing should be primarily based in building your reputation and making sure that your firm is visible in your community.  It's important for you to stay informed about changes to marketing on LinkedIn that could affect your company's business.  New sections for profiles should be filled out so that your LinkedIn marketing maintains competitiveness.

The future of the internet is being shaped every day, and from what forecasters today can tell us, the future is mobile.  You'll want to make sure that your LinkedIn content is visible and easy to use even for people using iPads or smart phones, rather than just for people who are accessing the internet from their PCs.  

An increasing number of people primarily check their LinkedIn accounts from mobile or tablet computing apps, and this is a trend that so far shows no signs of slowing down.  If a LinkedIn direct ad, for instance, links people to a website landing page that is full of images and long, scrolling text, preparing for the future will mean reshaping your landing pages to make them more accessible.

Everything About LinkedIn For Business

While your teenage daughter may be addicted to Facebook and Twitter, odds are your professional colleagues use LinkedIn more.  With over 160 million users, most of them educated professionals, LinkedIn has rapidly become the world's most popular gathering place for people who want to network.  If you want to develop new business for your law firm, you need to know how to use LinkedIn for business purposes.  Keep reading to find out how using LinkedIn for business can improve your reputation and your return on investment.

How to Use LinkedIn For Business, Tip #1: Me and You and Everyone We Know

Using LinkedIn for business depends completely on the quality of the network you can create.  If you want to have the most reach that you possibly can, it's important to cast a wide net.  When you start to use LinkedIn for business, you can import the contacts that you already have in most major email clients.  LinkedIn will look at your contacts and see which people have already learned how to use LinkedIn for business and have their own profiles.

One of the biggest mistakes new or inexperienced LinkedIn users make is just looking at that contact list once, then adding new contacts individually.  If you want to get the most out of LinkedIn for business purposes, remember that new people are learning how to use LinkedIn for business every day—in 2012, two people create a new account every second.

This means that using LinkedIn for business effectively requires you to check and recheck that same list of email contacts.  Since the website streamlines this process, there's no reason not to do a routine check when you use LinkedIn for business.  You may find that several of your contacts are now using LinkedIn for business who had not previously had an account—contacts that you would have missed if you weren't vigilant.

How to Use LinkedIn For Business, Tip #2: Bid on Clicks

Law firms are uniquely positioned to use LinkedIn for business using its direct ad system.  These pay per click advertisements are substantially cheaper on a per click basis than Google AdWords tend to be for lawyers, and it's easier to learn how to use LinkedIn for business direct ads than AdWords.  Why?  Because unlike Google, which uses keywords to figure out who to target your ad to, LinkedIn uses demographics.

This means that instead of having to agonize over which set of keywords will generate the best results, you can quickly start using LinkedIn for business pay per click ads.  You can decide exactly what kind of users will see your ads, and can even specify which job title those users have.  This kind of precision targeting is substantially better than Google AdWords, and is one of the best reasons to use LinkedIn for business a part of your marketing strategy.

How to Use LinkedIn For Business, Tip #3: Be Part of the Community

It's not enough just to advertise and have a complete profile.  Using LinkedIn for business means that you'll also have to join conversations and groups.  Joining a group—or starting one for an interest that you have—is one of the quickest and easiest ways to use LinkedIn for business.  As soon as someone joins your group, you are able to send them messages.  You can also start using LinkedIn for business with groups by sending mass messages to all group members about information that might interest all of them.

When learning how to use LinkedIn for business, some attorneys make the mistake of thinking that they can plaster their advertisements, complete with catchy slogans, across all the groups they're part of.  Unfortunately, that kind of behavior is likely to be perceived as spam, and will usually get you banned from a group.  Using LinkedIn for business doesn't mean spamming others, it means giving real advice and information and getting the same thing back from others in exchange.

How to Use LinkedIn For Business, Tip #4: Sharing What You Do

One of the best ways to start using LinkedIn for business is to actually share some aspect of your work with others.  Obviously, you should never use LinkedIn to share any kind of private or confidential information, but you can still look around for other things to share with others.  For example, if you wrote a blog entry that you think a large number of your contacts might find interesting, you can start using LinkedIn for business by posting it.

As you learn more about how to use LinkedIn for business, you may also want to import your slides from a PowerPoint presentation using the website's SlideShare feature.  SlideShare makes using LinkedIn for business presentation distribution easy, but be careful: edit any presentations you have made to erase any confidential information.  You may also want to include more text in a presentation that doesn't involve a presenter explaining each slide, for the sake of clarity.

How to Use Linkedin For Business, Tip #5:  You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours

Professional relationships require give and take.  When you are figuring out how to use LinkedIn for business, you should consider what you have to contribute as well as what you want to get out of your web presence.  Maybe you often get clients that need to be referred to other law firms—you may want to start using LinkedIn for business referrals of this type.  Once you refer a client to one of your LinkedIn for business contacts, you may get similar considerations from that attorney in the future.

The same sort of scenario can occur when you want to use LinkedIn for business reviews.  If you start using LinkedIn to generate new reviews, you may be able to help someone else out by writing an honest and positive review about their services based on firsthand experience or a person's reputation in the community.  They can then return the favor by creating a LinkedIn for business review for you.

Recent research shows that over half of consumers who search for an attorney online will eventually choose their lawyer this way—translating to over 30 million new clients annually.  Lawyers without an online marketing plan in 2012 need to be making one for next year if they haven't already started.  Online marketing plans can help to guide your firm's strategy as you navigate the ever-changing blend of trends and regulations that guides internet marketing today.

Key Media and Platforms for 2013 Online Marketing Plans

Social media is going to be the key to having a successful 2013 online marketing plan for most law firms.  Businesses that really understand how to use social media—not just the basic techniques of posting and interacting, but that also “get” on a fundamental level how to interact with users—have one of the best sources of referrals possible today.

However, your online marketing plan needs to take into account who you're generally marketing to.  Business to consumer law firms will want to focus on B2C havens like Facebook, Twitter, or even smaller and more niche friendly sites like Pinterest and Reddit.  However, if your firm mostly markets to businesses, there's still only one real contender.  LinkedIn is still the place your online marketing plans should focus on, at least for the foreseeable future.

“Return on Influence” or “Return on Investment”?

Over the last few years, as social media has come to dominate conversations about online marketing plans, “ROI” has come to sometimes mean “return on influence,” a more nebulous concept than the traditional “return on investment.”  The change is supposed to acknowledge that the returns on your social media investments may not always be immediately apparent, and that gaining influence and reputation in the market is also worth something.

While return on influence is perhaps a term better left behind, it's reflecting something very important that needs to show up in your online marketing plan.  If your online marketing plans make it seem like you're afraid to spend money or time on social media and other new ways of doing internet marketing, you may not be saving money in the long run.  You should be willing to spend some of what you make this year in your online marketing plan for reputation building and growth.

Competitor Research: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

You should always make sure you know the basics of what your competitors' online marketing plan for last year was.  You can investigate where a competitor's inbound links are coming from and get a good sense of where they're spending their time when they create online marketing plans.

Good competitor research takes your competitors into account when determining your budget and the audiences you want to reach.  However, bad competitor research happens when law firms do the research, then ignore the results—leading to a less than impressive competitive presence.  Then there's the truly ugly thing some law firms do: copy everything their competitor does, right down to using the same inbound linking sources.  Understanding how someone else's firm works doesn't mean you should try to be just like them.  Have your own brand identity, and be a little different—don't just copy your competitors' techniques, improve them!

Online Marketing Plan Mistakes Lawyers Make

Attorneys today often make the mistake of thinking that their online marketing plans can be set completely at the beginning of the year.  While it's a good idea to have some overarching guiding principles for how you want your 2013 online marketing plan to look, don't get too set on specifics.  Keep in mind that because the internet is changing rapidly, you need to make online marketing plans that can be adapted to adjust for minor or major contingencies.

Online companies can go out of business suddenly, or very significantly change their policies in a way that either greatly benefits or greatly harms your firm's online marketing plan.  When this happens, don't blindly move on without looking to see how your online marketing plans have been affected and what you need to do to prevent financial losses.

The Benefits of New Platform Research

You should also be prepared to invest some of your time and money into finding new places to market your services.  Because new online platforms for content marketing are being developed all the time, it's a good idea to include experimentation with some of these platforms in your online marketing plan.  Online marketing plans don 't need to latch onto every fad, but there's nothing wrong with trying out something new and seeing if it works well for your firm, especially if you think you have a winning idea to use.

Early adopters of technologies often get additional benefits from them  that people who only jump on the bandwagon later don't get.  For example, if you're part of a new platform when it's just being started, you learn community norms as they develop, instead of having to risk violating unwritten rules when you come into an already-established online community.

The #1 Thing You Aren't Spending Enough On

The vast majority of law firm online marketing plans don't spend enough money or time on analytics.  While this may not seem like the most glamorous part of an online marketing plan, it's one of the most critical parts if you want to see your returns on your online marketing growing throughout the year and beyond.

Analytics help you understand when something you've experimented with has been successful, and what parts of your online presence are working or failing.  Using analytics, you can find out when users “drop out” of reading your website to go back for browsing.  This can give you valuable feedback about which pages you need to improve your content for first.

The only way analytics can help, though, is if you're willing to listen to the findings.  Data doesn't lie, and if you find out, for example, that a much-lauded site redesign is resulting in fewer people getting past your splash page and lower conversion rates, you may want to abandon the redesign.  But you can also check for other reasons.  If fewer people are coming through your splash page, it may be that many people who would never have contacted you anyway got a clearer view of your firm's niche specialty area—saving them time and you a bit of bandwidth.

Everything About SEO Services Blog

If you're a busy attorney and you want to capitalize on the blog market, you can have an SEO service write blog entries for you.  Up to 80 percent of firms who are involved with search engine optimization outsource some or all of their SEO tasks to other companies, and there's no reason that you shouldn't use a ghostwriter to do some or all of your blog entries so you don't have to.

Can an SEO Services Blog Really Bring In Business?

The short answer is yes.  The long answer is yes, definitely!  An SEO service blog can in some ways be better than a blog you write on your own, and attorneys at small firms report an over 50% success rate with their blogs, even if they're not optimized for search engine indexing.

An SEO services blog will always be search engine optimized in a way that meets with the latest standards from search engines.  For instance, new updates to Google called Panda and Penguin have substantially changed the way the site ranks pages.  As an attorney, you may not have time to keep up with the newest changes to how search engines operate, but SEO services specialize in doing this exact thing.

An SEO service blog can bring in business in a few different ways.  First of all, there's the direct business that you get every time someone clicks on the links to your website in your SEO services blog and decides to call you.  Second, you can use your SEO service blog to get referrals from other attorneys.  Third, connecting your blog with social media can make your entries go viral, bringing in even more traffic.

A Word About SEO Service Blog Content

Because of recent search engine changes, it's more important than ever that your SEO services blog contains quality content.  Of course, without great content, your search engine page rank results don't mean much: people will just click on your SEO service blog, see that the content looks too spammy, and turn right back around to the rest of their search results.

One of the biggest ways that the new search indexing algorithms decide which site is better quality is by looking at links.  You'll want to make sure that your SEO services blog has headlines and content that makes people want to click, whether they're seeing a link to your SEO service blog on another blog or on your Facebook page.

Deciding on the Right Service for Your SEO Services Blog

With so many different companies offering to start an SEO service blog for attorneys, it's even more important to make sure you're getting the best quality content for your money.  Avoid any companies that will have your SEO services blog entries written by people who don't live in the United States.  These writers may work for less money, but their content can sometimes be extremely clunky and even ungrammatical—not the first impression you want to give your SEO service blog visitors.

Any company you hire should be able to show you samples of other blogs they've ghostwritten.  If the SEO services blog you see contains factual errors, cross that service off your list.  You also want your SEO service blog to have some personality.  Ideally, that personality will look a lot like yours, so your clients get the right impression from your SEO services blog.  Avoid services that make the content for every SEO service blog they write look the same.  You want your content to stand out, not look like everyone else's outsourced blog.

For a Great SEO Service Blog: Check the Competition!

Because only 12 percent of small firm attorneys currently maintain blogs, it's possible that none of your nearest competitors has a current blog.  If one or more of them do, though, you should look at their blogs to give direction to your SEO services blog.

There are a lot of good reasons to keep up with any blogs being run by your competition.  First of all, you never want to sound the same as someone else.  If your SEO service blog looks too similar to the blog your competitor has started, you may want to direct your ghostwriters to change focus a little bit.

Style is also important.  Do you see your competitor getting a lot of attention in social media and from search engines because of a particular stylistic technique, like asking commenters open-ended questions?  Ask the company writing your blog if they can incorporate these techniques into your blog to generate more buzz and more business.

You should also try having your SEO services blog link to other attorney blogs sometimes.  While this may seem like giving clients to the competition, the truth isn't so simple.  The internet is all about connections, and by giving a link you're more likely to get one from someone else in the future.

What if I'm Unhappy With My SEO Service Blog?

Your ghostwriter isn't you, and even if you discuss your desires for your blog with an SEO services company, it might not come out looking exactly like you had hoped.  Don't decide right away to drop the idea of an outsourced blog altogether.  You should try to talk to the company ghostwriting your blog and see if there's any way to communicate better about what your needs are.

Of course, not every ghostwriter is a great fit for every law firm.  If you've made repeated requests for the focus of your blog to change, for instance, and your blog is still running entries about the topic you started with, you may want to start shopping around for a new service to write your blog entries.

Keep in mind that if you're having your blog ghostwritten, a sudden change in style or writing quality will look strange.  If your existing blog hasn't gotten a lot of traffic or a lot of loyal followers, you may want to ask the new company handling your ghostwriting to just create a totally new blog for you.  This way, the changes won't be as noticeable.

Everything About Facebook Viral Marketing

While LinkedIn is the most common social media site for lawyers to have a profile on, Facebook is a close second.  Studies show that 68 percent of attorneys use Facebook at least once in a while.  If your firm wants to get into Facebook viral marketing to get clients, though, it won't necessarily be easy.  People interact with Facebook in very particular ways, and failing to pay attention to the prevailing norms can leave you with a worse reputation than before you got into the social media game.  In this guide, you'll learn four mistakes that a lot of law firms make when they begin Facebook viral marketing, and ways to avoid the mistake and get the clients or referrals you want.

Avoid This Mistake: Whoa, Text Overload!

One of the advantages the Facebook platform has over Twitter is that Facebook statuses can be significantly longer.  All the extra room may make you feel comfortable with writing long paragraphs of text, but be careful.  Studies show that Facebook users are much more likely to “Like” or otherwise interact with a post that is substantially shorter than the maximum length.

Remember that your updates aren't the only ones your readers are viewing.  People want to be able to scroll through their Facebook feeds relatively quickly, and if they get bogged down in text, they are likely to just keep moving instead of reading your Facebook viral marketing content.

Try This Instead: Short but Sweet

Keeping your Facebook status updates limited to the same character limit that Twitter uses—140 characters—can help you stay focused on maintaining brief messages that still hit hard.  If you want to link to a blog article, keep the text before your link very short and to the point.

The only time when you might want to have longer text for your Facebook viral marketing campaign is when you have something truly mind-blowing or unique to say.  If you can honestly say that a 250 character message is going to make people scrolling down their feed stop and say “wow,” and that you need that number of characters to convey the message, use it.  Just be aware that you may be losing out on the benefits of Facebook viral marketing if your content is too long too often.

Avoid This Mistake: Broadcasting Your Brand

Law firms that have done a great deal of advertising in the pre-social media days are often reluctant to adapt to the new norms of Facebook and the rest of the social media world.  Many of these firms think they're starting a Facebook viral marketing campaign, when in fact they're just dressing up the same old ad in more internet-savvy clothes.

You should never use a hard sell, or even use your Facebook statuses for directly advising people to contact your law office.  More than anything else, this is the mistake that can make you look like a Facebook viral marketing rookie, and will drive Facebook friends and fans away fast.

Try This Instead: Work on Your Conversation Skills

No one likes the person who spends every moment talking about themselves.  Remember that when your Facebook icon is being seen by viewers, it's being seen among the voices of many individual people—what personality do you want that icon to have?  If you don't want to be seen as self-centered, you need to learn to participate in the conversations that the people you're connected with are having.

When people comment on your status updates and links, keep the conversation going if you can.  You should also try to make at least some of your status updates questions, rather than statements.  People like to be asked what they think, and it's a great Facebook viral marketing strategy to use this kind of question to actually generate more content.  Ask people what they want to see you talk about next, and then follow through and deliver that content.

Avoid This Mistake: The Vanilla Firm—Hold the Vanilla

Horror stories about what happens when companies offend the social media universe abound.  That's why it's no wonder that some firms tone down their personality in an attempt to be all things to all people.  These firms may be trying to be professional, but they end up seeming like vanilla ice cream without the vanilla—a bland, boring glop.

Try This Instead: Spice it Up

You don't have to be boring to maintain your professional reputation.  While it would still be a bad idea to try raunchy or inappropriate Facebook viral marketing, there's nothing wrong with livening up your messages.  People prefer to read posts from people (and law firms) with a great personality.  You need to let yours shine through if you want your Facebook viral marketing to be as successful as it can be.

Avoid This Mistake: Shutting Down Negativity

Uh oh—now you've done it.  You've made a mistake online, a big one, and now an Angry Customer On the Internet is ready to start a nationwide boycott and probably burn your office down, for good measure.  These mistakes can be especially painful because they occur in public, where anyone can see that you did the wrong thing.

Of course, if the whole thing was in comments after a Facebook post, you could just delete the whole thing and never speak of it again, right?  Wrong.

Try This Instead: Talk It Out

Unless someone's actually harassing or threatening you, your Facebook viral marketing efforts will be best served by actually discussing the problem, instead of trying to make it go away.  Transparency through this process is key.  If you're perceived as having censored critics, you are unlikely to win new friends or further your Facebook viral marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that as long as you keep someone talking and manage to defuse the situation, it will generally go away very quickly.  Stay polite and upbeat in all communication with negative people on your Facebook page.  An internet mob has a short attention span, and as long as you don't add fuel to the fire with comebacks, defensiveness, or censorship, they'll find something else to be angry about soon enough.

Everything About LinkedIn Tips

Every new website you use has a learning curve, and LinkedIn is no exception.  With nearly 77 percent of LinkedIn users using the site to research people and companies, you can't afford not to know the best, most up to date LinkedIn tips.  Learning LinkedIn profile tips can make your profile more appealing at first glance, and other kinds of tips can make sure that you are getting the most out of your groups and network.  Keep reading to find some LinkedIn tips that can change the way you use social media to do business.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #1: Don't Hide

When you create your profile on LinkedIn, you'll be asked which privacy level you want your profile to be listed at—and that's where these LinkedIn profile tips begin.  One of the most important LinkedIn profile tips is to select “public” for this profile.  When you create a public profile, you're getting your face, name, and brand in front of a much wider audience than if you had been more selective about who can see it.

And speaking of photos, every list of LinkedIn profile tips will tell you to include one.  While these LinkedIn tips are right—every profile should have a photo, not just a logo—they aren't the whole story.  Go beyond those LinkedIn profile tips by using the same photograph on your LinkedIn profile that you use in your attorney bio.

Why?  Well, not all of your connections on LinkedIn will necessarily know you personally, especially if you're involved in groups.  It can be hard to recognize that someone is the same person from one picture to another.  By using these LinkedIn profile tips, create one image that is you for the sake of your internet presence.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #2: Be Original

Another place where a few LinkedIn profile tips can make a huge difference is your summary.  While your picture should be identical to your website photo, your summary should not be identical to your attorney bio.  Why?  Because let's face it: most attorney bios sound about the same, and you won't get anywhere with LinkedIn profile tips sounding like a robot.  Many of the best LinkedIn tips revolve around making yourself stand out, and your summary is a good place to do that.

For example, if you've already followed LinkedIn profile tips about filling in your whole profile and using a photo, you can make your summary more original by talking about yourself using “I” and “me” rather than maintaining a third-person, more objective sounding narrative.  A couple of quick additional LinkedIn tips for this section: talk about both the projects you're currently working on and what you're hoping to expand into doing in the future, and make sure that you always update your summary when those projects or goals change.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #3: Be Active

LinkedIn is a conference table, not a billboard.  You can't just walk away from your profile and expect it to do the marketing work for you.  In order to get the most out of any of these LinkedIn profile tips (and other LinkedIn tips), you'll need to make sure that your profile is routinely seen by other people.  That means you'll need to stay active and participate enthusiastically in your LinkedIn network.

Good LinkedIn tips about activity require you to do more than just providing an occasional status update.  Instead, you'll want to make posts to groups, start groups of your own (if you can think of a good topic), and share things that you've learned.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #4: Keep Current

One of the earlier LinkedIn profile tips was to make sure that you update your profile routinely.  That's one way of keeping current, but in order to make sure that you are getting the most out of the website, you should also follow news about any changes that are being made to LinkedIn itself.  These kinds of changes are common as LinkedIn figures out how people are using the website and how the internet itself is evolving.

When you keep current, you'll be able to take advantage of new features before your competitors do, giving you an advantage, even if only a temporary one.  Search for new LinkedIn profile tips and other tips on a regular basis, so that you can keep your LinkedIn presence updated and ensure that you're acting in accordance with best practices for marketing purposes.

If catching up on new LinkedIn features has been tough and you're already finding that you've fallen behind, make a list of which LinkedIn profile tips you'd like to follow, and create a calendar with deadlines for each different tip you're following.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #5: Get Connected

Today, people can access LinkedIn using more devices than ever.  If you have an iPad or a smartphone, you may already use LinkedIn through these devices, like an increasing number of users.  Using these devices to connect to LinkedIn during your commute or other downtime can really help you to engage with the website and your network on a daily basis.

You can also work to connect your LinkedIn marketing efforts with other marketing campaigns involving different social media websites or blogs.  By creating a consistent brand presence across several different social media networks, your visibility increases and you're more likely to get new business.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #6: Track Progress

There are a wide variety of analytics tools that you can use to see if your LinkedIn efforts are bringing in the new traffic you had hoped for, especially if you're using direct pay per click ads.  When you use analytics tools, you can do split testing to determine which of your advertisements is more effective at getting conversions from a particular audience.

Even if you're not using direct ads, you can keep track of how many contacts you've gained and how much new business you've gotten as a result of your LinkedIn efforts.  This can help you to see where your strengths are and what kinds of activities you should engage in more frequently.