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Although some big players have withdrawn their support for Facebook advertising after seeing less than ideal results, this has had little impact on overall Facebook advertising revenues.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.

It's not easy to admit when you've made an internet marketing mistake.  Sometimes, attorneys put thousands of dollars into a new advertising method before realizing that something just isn't going according to plan.  But what's actually preventing your internet marketing campaign from succeeding?  The answer may surprise you.  In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the most common marketing mistakes that attorneys make when they're using the web to advertise their services.

Mistake #1: Paying Before Your Website is Ready For Traffic

If you've just found out about a new web marketing technique, you may be enthusiastic about trying it out.  Sometimes, in fact, legal marketing professionals can get a little too enthusiastic about new methods.  If you're not making sure that your website is ready first, you may as well be lighting your money on fire—you're unlikely to gain any actual new clients no matter how much money you throw at your advertising project.

Signs that your website isn't ready for primetime include pieces of it that don't display or display incorrectly depending on what browser you're using.  If your website looks boring, dated, or simply like a thousand other attorney websites, you're also going to have a much harder time keeping potential clients on your website.  Optimize your user experience, and you'll have better luck with every internet marketing campaign you ever engage in.

Mistake #2: Buying Expensive Google Keywords

If particular keywords on Google are the most expensive ones to buy, they must be the best ones, right?  Wrong.  This is one of the mistakes many people who are new to buying direct ads on Google make.  However, most of the firms that are paying big bucks for big, heavily used search terms are very large firms with very large marketing budgets.  If that doesn't describe your firm, you don't need to be buying the most expensive keywords you can on Google.

Instead, focus on locally based, “long tail” keywords.  You should also consider using some negative keywords, so that you're not putting your advertisement up for searches that may not be relevant to what your firm does.

Mistake #3: Focusing on Search Engine Optimization Keywords

A few years ago, search engine optimization was all the rage, and it largely depended on having the right ratio of keywords in your internet marketing copy.  However, many different websites misused SEO and created low-quality websites that didn't really fulfill users' needs but did have a lot of keywords.

Today, Google and Bing/Yahoo have made their search engines substantially more difficult to fool with keyword counts and nonsense content.  If you're overusing search engine optimization keywords in your internet marketing, odds are that your website is or will become “sandboxed” by Google—artificially lowered in search rankings in order to discourage spammy techniques from internet marketers.

Mistake #4: Low Quality, Jargon-Filled Content

Attorneys may have gone to three years of law school, but usually their clients haven't.  That's why it's important to make sure that any content you create on your website avoids the pitfall of being written at a law school level.  In general, an average high school graduate should be able to read your website copy and come away from it with a good understanding of the material you've presented.

One of the best ways to make sure that your internet marketing content really is readable for lay people is to simply give a draft of some of your content to people you know who are less informed about the law than the people in your office.  These people can provide you with questions or pointers that can help you move in the right direction.

Mistake #5: Underbudgeting For Internet Marketing

Over 80 percent of Americans now have access to the internet, and about 60 million internet users in America will be looking online for an attorney in 2013.  That's a huge potential market, and what's more, over 50 percent of those potential clients will eventually contact an attorney about their case after researching lawyers online.

With this big an audience on the line, it's silly to make internet marketing a secondary marketing priority in 2013.  The internet has become the biggest way to shop for a lawyer, surpassing even the time-tested personal recommendation as the most common method for attorney research and selection.

Mistake #6: Shotgun Marketing

Many lawyers believe that their marketing materials should try to appeal to as many people as possible.  This kind of marketing is like a shotgun—when you fire it, it goes everywhere instead of being precisely targeted.  The kind of internet marketing you should want is like a rifle—targeted narrowly so that you have the best chance of hitting what you're aiming at.  Shotgun marketing costs more for a smaller return, and the best marketing principles for attorneys today all involve making sure that you're targeting the correct audience for your marketing materials.

Mistake #7: Putting All Your Eggs In One Basket

There's no reason to spend your entire internet marketing budget on just one or two websites, no matter how big those websites are.  Diversifying where your website appears in advertisements is a great idea.  If you put all your eggs in one basket, keep in mind that search engine algorithms change all the time.  You don't want to be just one Google update from losing a large number of clients because the site you advertise with is no longer popular.  Diversification shields you from changes large and small in internet marketing trends.

Mistake #8: Losing Flexibility

If you find an internet marketing strategy that genuinely works for your law firm, you may be tempted to keep simply using it without continuing to search for new techniques.  While this may work in the short term quite well, it's very likely that you can expect to see additional changes to internet marketing trends in the mid and long term.  The law firms that will do best at internet marketing in the future are those flexible enough to change and adapt their techniques to take those trends into account.

Everything About LinkedIn Statistics

In a country like the United States, where 90 percent of lawyers are already. Using LinkedIn, you can't afford to get left behind.  According to Alexa, LinkedIn became the 12th most visited website worldwide in 2012.  This popularity means that LinkedIn can and should be a vital component of your legal marketing strategy.  Keep reading to find out some shocking LinkedIn statistics so that you know why it's so important to maintain your networks on this site.

LinkedIn Statistics: Growth and Development

In 2002, LinkedIn was started by a single entrepreneur in his living room.  The month it began, LinkedIn statistics registered 4,500 unique users.  The next years saw the website grow exponentially, and by the time LinkedIn went public in May of 2011, it was already a place where over 100 million people were networking.

LinkedIn pre-dated Facebook and Twitter, and maintained its popularity throughout the explosion of these websites' user bases for one big reason: it wasn't trying to do the same things.  While LinkedIn, like Facebook and Twitter, was a social media website that gave people the opportunity to share content and follow the activity of others, it carved its own brand niche as the center of the web for professionals.  The business orientation of LinkedIn has meant that its popularity among lawyers has soared in recent years.  Over 80 percent of attorneys at all sizes of law firms currently have a LinkedIn profile.

The number of searches done on LinkedIn is truly staggering.  LinkedIn statistics today show that 4.2 billion searches were made last year, and this year's numbers are set to break that record by over a billion searches.

From a living room enterprise, LinkedIn has become a company with 25 offices worldwide from Milan to Melbourne.  Nearly 3,000 people are currently full time employees of LinkedIn, and they serve the site's 175 million users.  Every Fortune 500 company has executives using LinkedIn, and the site's users have formed more than one million groups.

Linkedin Statistics: Who's Using LinkedIn?

Because LinkedIn is business oriented, its user base differs significantly in several key ways from other social media websites.  Over half of LinkedIn users report having at least a bachelor's degree, with a sizeable percentage having graduate or post-graduate coursework.  LinkedIn users also have statistically higher income levels than users of other common social media websites, like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg.

The fastest growing groups on LinkedIn today are college students and recent graduates.  These students account for over 10 percent of LinkedIn's current traffic, and are increasingly looking to the website to help them secure networking opportunities, internships, and eventually jobs.  Many law school students also make profiles on LinkedIn to be able to connect with law firms and discuss opportunities or just build a network of other lawyers in their desired practice area.

It's not all individuals who are using LinkedIn.  Over 2 million companies also maintain Company Pages according to the most recent LinkedIn statistics.  Because LinkedIn tends to be a better place for business to business transactions, B2B companies are particularly likely to participate.  Companies selling products marketed toward affluent consumers also tend to prefer LinkedIn to its competitors.

LinkedIn Statistics: How People Use LinkedIn

The single most common way that LinkedIn users make use of the website is by researching people or companies that they have some sort of personal or business interest in.  77 percent of users report this kind of activity, while the next most common action is connecting with colleagues you've fallen out of touch with.

LinkedIn statistics reveal some other uses for the website as well, with nearly 50 percent of users building new relationships with key decision makers and influential people.  44.5 percent of LinkedIn users report that they've used the research functionality of the site to get a leg up in face to face networking opportunities, while for 38% of users, LinkedIn has been a springboard for finding new career opportunities.  38% of LinkedIn users also built relationships with potential customers using the site—mostly users who run B2B oriented companies.

The feature of LinkedIn that users are most likely to report as a favorite is the Groups feature, followed closely by people searching.  LinkedIn statistics also reveal that some features of the site are being underutilized, with only 5.9% of users reporting that they like using polling, while only 1.7% is using the presentation features LinkedIn makes available.

On average, LinkedIn statistics show that users spend about 17 minutes using the site every time they log in.  About half of users spend up to 2 hours a week using LinkedIn, while a quarter spends 3-4 and 12.2% spends 5-6.  10.5 percent of users are power users (or addicts?) spending at least 8 hours a week on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Statistics: Groups and Networks

Your number of first degree connections on LinkedIn can make a big difference to how well the site works to get new business for your firm.  Currently, 11.7 percent of LinkedIn users have fewer than 50 contacts, which will limit their opportunities for networking.  About 20 percent have 50-100 connections, while another 20 percent have between 100 and 200.  

Only five percent of users have more than 1000 first-level connections, and having this many connections can sometimes be an indicator that you are not being selective about allowing new connections to come in.  Allowing simply anyone to connect to you through a request can mean that you're more likely to be vulnerable to phishing attacks and other hacking, so be careful and make sure that you actually know anyone you are accepting as a first degree connection.

Because groups are one of people's favorite aspects of the LinkedIn platform, a huge majority of users report joining at least one group.  Only 3.7% of LinkedIn users have joined no groups at all, with a plurality of 41.6% belonging to between 1 and 9 total groups.  Over 30 percent of users belong to 10-29 groups, and it may surprise you to learn that over 10 percent use more than fifty groups.

Everything About LinkedIn Review

LinkedIn had humble beginnings in a programmer's living room just ten years ago.  Today, it's one of the 50 most visited websites in the world.  LinkedIn reviews can help you to evaluate whether creating a LinkedIn profile would be beneficial for you individually or as part of a business.  Because no one LinkedIn review covers everything, and because you may need to read several reviews to know how LinkedIn can help your law firm, in this guide we've tried to make some general conclusions about the website based on a large number of trusted LinkedIn reviews.

What's So Great About LinkedIn?

One thing that almost every LinkedIn review today mentions is how enormous LinkedIn has gotten.  The huge user base—over 160 million members and growing by nearly 200,000 people every day—is unique among social media websites.  As LinkedIn reviews can tell you, while consumer-oriented social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) have users with a wide range of backgrounds, LinkedIn is primarily a business tool.

For law firms, the user base of LinkedIn is even better.  Every LinkedIn review about using the site as a law firm marketing tool will mention the staggering number of lawyers with a profile: between 80 and 90 percent of all attorneys in the United States use LinkedIn according to these LinkedIn reviews.  What this means is that you won't need to work hard to get your professional contacts into LinkedIn—odds are, they're already there.

LinkedIn allows you to share what you're doing with others and strengthen your networking contacts from your own computer.  You can also do direct advertising that is similar to the kind of pay per click ads appearing on Google AdWords (more on what LinkedIn reviews have to say about that in a minute).

If you're interested in having reviews on your website, your LinkedIn contacts can actually create a LinkedIn review of your law firm and have it automatically posted to your website.  Having a positive LinkedIn review is good—having several positive LinkedIn reviews can substantially increase the conversion rate once people see your website.

What's Not So Great?

Social media skeptics are often reluctant to join any website that wants to obtain their personal information.  While LinkedIn reviews its privacy information frequently, you should remember that a great deal of the information posted on your LinkedIn page can be seen by the public, and nearly all of it can be seen by the people in your network.

The privacy problems were made even worse in June of 2012.  Any LinkedIn review that doesn't bring up these potential problems is ignoring a very real concern for many internet users.  Over 6 million passwords were stolen in June and made available online.  Because (as many LinkedIn reviews after the hacking incident made clear) LinkedIn asks users to create a strong password, people's strongest passwords and passphrases were compromised.

LinkedIn reviews also note that users are vulnerable to another type of security problem: “spear phishing,” in which your public data on LinkedIn is used to make it appear that a message you receive is from a co-worker or contact.  An internal LinkedIn review of this problem has been ongoing, but so far no major changes have been made to combat this possibility.

Usually, any negative LinkedIn review will mention that compared to the other big social media hubs today, LinkedIn appears to be somewhat bland and featureless.  LinkedIn reviews usually find that there aren't as many features that have a great deal of mass appeal—it's less flashy, in short.  That's somewhat by design, given the intended audience: odds are, if LinkedIn increased these types of features, a new negative LinkedIn review would talk about how the changes were bringing in non-professionals.

How Can I Get the Most Out of LinkedIn?

LinkedIn can help you more when you use it more.  By tying in your LinkedIn page with the rest of your branding and social media efforts, you can increase its value to your company.  If you just set up a LinkedIn profile and never use the website or interact with other users, you're not going to get the kind of value that LinkedIn reviews discuss.  If, instead, you interact a lot, and encourage professionals to give you a LinkedIn review that appears on your website when they're happy with your firm's services, you'll find that it becomes a much more useful marketing tool.

Remember that using a site like LinkedIn effectively isn't just “playing around on the internet,” it's genuinely something that can help your business.  You can get more LinkedIn reviews for your business and more leads when you encourage your attorneys to use the site and check out what's new on a daily basis.  That time isn't wasted—it's being used to increase brand awareness of your firm and get new connections that can develop into new business.

Advertising With LinkedIn

While most professionals like LinkedIn's main functionalities, LinkedIn reviews are mixed about whether the website's direct ads are useful for businesses.  Usually, when a LinkedIn review about the site's advertisements laments a low ROI, it's because the business involved wasn't a great fit for LinkedIn's target audience.

To an extent, lawyers can disregard negative LinkedIn reviews about the advertising system, because law firms are in a unique position to capitalize on these ads.  Rather than using LinkedIn ads to market to new clients, you may want to target your pay per click LinkedIn ad campaigns on advertising to other attorneys, in order to increase the number of referrals received by your firm.

Attorneys also have another advantage that a typical LinkedIn review may not take into account: nearly every lawyer in the United States uses LinkedIn, making it the website with the most ability to connect you to other law firms.  Other industries have not seen anywhere close to the adoption rate of LinkedIn that has occurred in the legal world.  Because of this, legal advertising is likely to be more effective than advertising for some other product or service.

Everything About LinkedIn Network

Having a LinkedIn profile means nothing if you aren't connected to anyone.  Building your LinkedIn network is absolutely critical if you want to have a viable social media strategy as a law firm.  Almost 70 percent of LinkedIn users today have at least 100 first degree connections in their network.  If you're not there yet, keep reading.  These LinkedIn networking tips can help you expand your connections and improve your reputation with other professionals and in your community as a whole.

LinkedIn Networking Tips #1: Keep Checking Your Contacts

Some LinkedIn networking tips will warn you against having the website look through your Outlook contacts and automatically indicate people who already have LinkedIn accounts.  Typically, the reason that people are reluctant to build their LinkedIn network this way is that they are wary about what LinkedIn will do with the information, or concerned with the potential of hacking.

While the website has had several high profile privacy gaffes in recent years (including a leak of 6.5 million password hashes in 2012), keep in mind that you're already giving a great deal of personal information to LinkedIn about who you know.  The advantages of being able to build your LinkedIn network so quickly with the automatic contact importing feature easily outweigh any disadvantages from a perceived invasion of privacy.

Whenever you make a new contact, you should always see if they're on LinkedIn.  But what about the people who were already in your contact list but just didn't have a LinkedIn account quite yet?  That's where these LinkedIn networking tips come in: In order to make sure you're keeping up with which of your contacts now have LinkedIn network pages, you should recheck your Outlook address book with the automatic connection tool on a regular basis.

LinkedIn Networking Tips #2: Reciprocity and Return

The basis of social media networks is interaction, and the users in your Linkedin network will work for you more if you work for them.  Don't just stalk other people's profiles and do research and reconnaissance.  This kind of behavior will usually make your LinkedIn network distrustful of you and won't win any friends or new business opportunities.

Instead, the best LinkedIn networking tips will always tell you to be transparent.  The more information that you make available about yourself, the more other people will be willing to share with you and the more likely it is that a new contact will accept your connection request even if they don't know you very well.

Don't be afraid to give information and advice to your LinkedIn network.  Keep in mind that even though you're giving the information away for free, this will often mean that other people will return the favor by sharing similar types of information with you, or even referring new business your way.  They can also help by giving you new LinkedIn networking tips about a firm or attorney you're not already connected to. There is never a reason to be a miser with your information with your LinkedIn network, as long as you're not revealing anything confidential or that would violate your ethics.

LinkedIn Networking Tips #3: Become a Groupie

When LinkedIn users were polled about which features on LinkedIn were their favorite, the largest number (almost 80 percent) picked groups.  Because so many attorneys are already using LinkedIn, you can almost always find a group that's talking about a topic that will interest you.  These groups are a great way to meet new people and learn new things about your practice area, emerging legal technology, or whatever else interests you professionally or personally.

Groups offer several additional advantages, as well—which is probably why over 96 percent of LinkedIn users belong to at least one group, and why no LinkedIn networking tips would be complete without some tips for getting the most out of groups.  For example, you're not usually able to contact a person unless you already have an existing connection to that person through the LinkedIn network.  However, if you're in the same group as somebody else, you can send them a private message.  This means that whenever you really need to contact someone you have no connection with, you can always try joining a group they're part of, then sending the message.

LinkedIn Networking Tips #4: Make Something Useful

If you're involved in conversations as part of several groups, you'll already be building your LinkedIn network at a great pace.  If you want to get LinkedIn networking tips to make even more first level connections, though, you need to think of something you can create that will be unique.  

Whether it's a useful e-book or a quick app that helps people decide whether they need to hire a lawyer for a particular legal issue, making something new is a great way to get your name passed around and watch your LinkedIn network swell accordingly.

If you're not sure what kind of new content would be most useful for building your LinkedIn network, just observe groups relevant to your practice area for a while and look for an unmet need.  If you provide something that can help to fulfill that desire, you won't have to do the work of distributing it—all you'll have to do is post it to some LinkedIn groups and watch your connections do the distribution work for you.

LinkedIn Networking Tips #5: Back to Basics

Keep in mind that you can build your LinkedIn network offline as well as online.  It's a good idea to customize your profile URL so that you can easily include it on a business card and hand it out at any in-person networking opportunities you may have.  

Many lists of LinkedIn networking tips ignore the fact that you can vastly expand your LinkedIn network with just a few new in-person contacts from a conference or seminar.  Don't forget that while the online world is very important for law firms today, it's not a replacement for face to face networking opportunities—it's an enhancement to them.

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.