Time is money, and most law firms today don't have enough of either.  Over half of social media marketing professionals say that one of their biggest problems is a simple lack of time to implement their company's social strategies.  What's more, in many law offices, the person who is in charge of social media marketing is also trying to juggle a wide variety of other responsibilities.  In this guide, we'll take a look at how to use your social media marketing time as efficiently as possible.  Keep in mind that the most efficient uses of your time are the ones that help you best meet your goals—not the ones that give you the biggest online footprint at all costs.

#1: Have a Plan Before You Start

The major social networking websites have made it so easy to get started and create a profile that you may think the best way to get started is to just dive in.  While that can be a good philosophy sometimes, it's not a very good idea for social networks.  Why?  Because each of them has its own needs and norms, and you'll want to have a good understanding of what's going on before you commit a faux pas.

Having a plan also saves you time.  If you go in without understanding what you're doing, it may seem like it saved you time in research.  But in the end, having to learn everything from scratch, going down dead ends and having no immediate aims, will waste your time and your money.  Know what you want out of social media before you get started with your implementation.

#2: Have Daily, Weekly, and Monthly To-Do Lists

There are many things that you'll want to do on your social networking websites every day.  For example, you should always check to see any comments that have been made, and scan for any posts that have been made about your firm at least once per day.  Having a daily checklist makes it significantly easier to make sure that you're not forgetting anything that could come back to haunt you later.

However, to avoid getting behind on other maintenance issues for your social networking accounts, make sure that you also have once a week and once a month tasks.  Having this kind of scheduling takes a little while initially, but pays off dividends in improved efficiency later.

#3: Set Time Limits—But Don't Be Foolish

It's usually a good idea to have an idea of how long you want to spend on each of the social networks you use.  If you set time limits and generally adhere to them, you'll ensure that you're not wasting too much time on a network that isn't as easy to use or one that gets only a low amount of traffic.

However, be willing to make your time limits flexible under the right circumstances.  For example, if it turns out that you're having something of a social media public relations crisis on Twitter, it's fine to neglect some of your other social media accounts a bit for a day or two.

#4: Learn What's Going Right and Wrong

Analytics are a great way to save time, even though they take time to perform.  Why?  Because by performing analytics tasks, you'll learn which of your marketing efforts are working and which ones aren't.  This means that you won't keep throwing your time and money into a black hole that won't give anything back.

By using analytics tools like Google Analytics, you'll learn how people interact with your website and how they get there from social media sites.  If you're not using any kind of analytics tools, you're just guessing—and guessing's a great way to waste time and effort that could be more efficiently used.

#5: Don't Post Random Garbage

New social media profiles for companies often make some amateur errors.  One of the biggest of those errors can be seen when a company's Facebook profile or Twitter feed simply looks like someone's personal feed.  Posting random things that you find personally interesting but aren't going to be fascinating to potential clients will just turn people off.

Always keep your audience in mind.  Don't ever make a post without being able to answer the question, “who will want to read this, and why?”  If you can't answer that question, consider writing down your post idea and keeping it for a later time in case you figure out a way to make it more marketable.

#6: Get Social Media Dashboards and Tools

One of the biggest things you can do to save time when you're using several social networks is to get a dashboard that allows for easy switching between social networks.  Many of these dashboards allow you to sign in with dozens of different social networks, allowing you to customize your social media presence.

These dashboards can also help you to craft alerts that will tell you any time someone mentions your firm's name or makes a comment on one of your posts.

#7: Don't Go Down the Rabbit Hole

The biggest way to waste time on the internet is to let one thing on social media lead you to another, which leads you to another—keep making sure when you're using social media platforms that all of your actions are relevant.  This is especially critical because it is important to look at other people's comments and posts, and even sometimes to respond to them—but you don't want to get so sidetracked and lost in tangents that you forget the main point of your presence on social networking sites.

#8: Pick Your Battles and Platforms

Don't try to respond to every comment everyone makes—especially not if they're just simple statements.  Questions should always be answered, but let people leave compliments sometimes without hovering, or with a simple “like” of their comment instead of a response.  Hovering can make people uncomfortable.  You should also keep your social networking to a small number of networks—trying to use all of them will only result in you dividing your attention too many ways.

According to a recent study, Twitter may be nearly 10 times as effective as LinkedIn at getting law firms new business contacts in the B2B world.  This means that if you've been using LinkedIn as your sole method of online social media marketing for businesses, you need to learn something new.  In this guide, we'll go in-depth about Twitter and why it has become such a good B2B marketing tool.  You'll learn valuable tricks and tips for using Twitter effectively in your law firm's online marketing strategy for 2013.

Why Twitter?  Why Now?

A few years ago, almost no one “tweeted,” and Twitter was considered a social media fad only for the very most connected.  Now, the situation has changed drastically.  Famous and trending Twitter accounts and hashtags can make real-world headlines, and more businesses than ever are not just posting to Twitter, but also reading what other people have to say there.

Ideally, you'd have signed up for Twitter oh, say, a year ago, maybe 18 months if you were an earlier adopter.  However, there's no time like the present to start making up lost ground.  You can set up a Twitter account in about five to ten minutes, and once your account has been established, you can begin looking around.

The 140 Character Limit: Making it Work For You

The thing that differentiates Twitter from its competitors is actually a limitation on content.  While blogs allow unlimited amounts of writing and social networks like Facebook allow for long updates, the longest possible “tweet” is just 140 characters long.  This SMS-like length is one of the greatest strengths of Twitter—because it allows people to read “headline” formats and get linked to things that interest them more easily—but it can be very hard to adjust to, especially for attorneys, who are used to being able to take much more than 140 characters to explain a concept.

Keep in mind that often, your 140 characters can actually include a link that goes elsewhere.  Twitter automatically shortens URLs, which means that they won't take up very many of your characters.  You should also make sure to leave enough room in your tweet that other people can retweet it easily.  Consider about 120 characters to be your “real” maximum—a full 140 character tweet can actually be fairly difficult to share without cutting things out.

When Do We Post?

One of the best things about Twitter is that the short tweet length allows you to experiment a bit with posting at different times, on different days, and so forth.  Experimentation is by far the best way to figure out when your target market is most likely to post re-tweets and otherwise interact with your Twitter account.

Generally, you'll have better luck toward the end of the business day and into early evening than you will first thing in the morning.  Middle of the night tweets are unlikely to be noticed by many people at all—by morning, people's twitter feeds will have already become full of new morning posts, and no matter how brilliant the blog you linked to at 3 AM was, it's unlikely any of your followers will actually see it.

Interacting With Other Businesses

As tweeting becomes more popular, it's more and more likely that the businesses you need most to interact with are using Twitter accounts, too.  Consider following the Twitter accounts of businesses that you would like to have a better connection to.  Then, when those businesses post interesting tweets, retweet them or write a reply.

These kinds of low time commitment interactions are a great way to feel out a potential new client.  They can use the way you interact on Twitter to understand what kind of fit your law firm would be for them if they signed on with you.  Remember to always stay professional, even if your interaction with another company doesn't go the way you would like or expect.

The Biggest Twitter Rule: Don't Be Boring

While there are many different tips and tricks for Twitter users, the biggest rule for people wanting to get followers is this: don't bore your audience.  The more bored your audience, the less likely that they'll re-post anything you write, and the more likely that they'll simply stop following you.

There are many ways to be boring.  Posting constantly, so that you dominate other people's Twitter feeds even at the cost of them seeing tweets from friends and family, is a great way to bore and annoy your readers.  Similarly, posting content that's all advertising about how great your firm is, without having any content that informs readers or actually helps your audience, will just look boring—and it'll look like you're clueless about what Twitter can actually be used for.

Following and Getting Followers

Keep in mind that your absolute number of followers isn't nearly as important as whether those followers are influential.  Too many law firms make the mistake of thinking that the number of followers they've gotten is the main indicator of whether their firm is doing well in social media circles.  Unfortunately, if your followers are just spammers or other low quality accounts, the number won't make a difference—you still won't see your posts going viral, no matter what you do.

Twitter in the Future

It's obviously very difficult to predict whether people will still be tweeting in five years.  However, there are some relatively good indications that social networking and social media websites are here to stay.  Perhaps the biggest threat to Twitter, as well as other social media sites, is the bottom line.  In 2010 and 2011, Twitter lost money.

This year, there are murmurs that for the first time ever, Twitter may turn a real profit.  If this happens, it will likely mean that the service will continue for several years.  However, a continued pattern of losses could start to mean a loss of investors and capital.  While Twitter has still managed to get investors to sign on while it was losing money, due to its popularity, at some point that popularity will plateau—and if it's not making money by then, it may shut down, forcing businesses to move on to other social networks instead.

Over 90 percent of law firms are now using social media marketing of some type for 2013.  When it comes to setting your social media goals, an obvious question arises: how do you know if you've been successful implementing your social media strategies?  The question becomes even harder once you start going down the rabbit hole and using several social media platforms to achieve your marketing goals.  In this guide, we'll explore why traditional metrics of marketing success no longer work for the new social media landscape, and how to develop your own understanding of how you're being perceived by social media viewers.

The Problem: Qualitative Data in a Quantitative World

The biggest issue that most law firms encounter when trying to understand their return on investment for social media is that in many ways, the effects of social media aren't easily quantifiable.  You won't see, for instance, the same kind of obvious returns that you might see from a pay per click advertising campaign, where it's clear how many people request additional information or a consultation appointment.

The approach of some businesses has been to try to create quantitative metrics anyhow.  This, however, is a case of shoving square pegs into round holes.  The way to succeed with social media is to embrace its non-quantitative nature.  You don't just need friends in large numbers—gaining ten friends with far reaching social influence could be much better than gaining a hundred who barely post to their social media feeds or tend to post a large quantity of irrelevant content. 

If you're focusing on these kinds of metrics just because they're easy to quantify, you're missing the forest for the trees.  The success of a social media campaign isn't in how many new followers it gives you, but in how much it raises your company's reputation.  For instance, having a great response to someone's question could result in not gaining any new followers—but if that person tells several other people about their interaction, either on social media channels or in person, your law firm's reputation is enhanced.

Consider using as your main metric “number of meaningful social media interactions.”  Look for interactions that go beyond just a simple answer to a question or a link to a website.  Check out how many of your law firm's interactions with clients, colleagues, and others on social media are really responsive and worthwhile.  By trying to grow this number, you'll come much closer to being able to capture the full potential of social media campaigns.

What Kind of Social Media Presence Do You Want?

Before you start actually working on your social media campaigns and strategy for the rest of 2013, you should consider what kind of personality you want your firm to project in social media.  Some law firms are choosing to have a more casual social media presence that is understandable, heavy on vernacular and humor, and doesn't take itself too seriously in any way.  Other law firms want to maintain an impeccably professional web presence in all areas, including on social media websites.

You can choose your own path, but make sure that you're actually making a choice.  Don't think that you have to show your firm in one particular way just to be taken seriously.  If you can use humor skillfully and gracefully, without insulting people you want on your side, you can have a very different kind of web presence.  You don't need to look like everyone else—in fact, from a branding standpoint, it's always best if you can find your own authentic voice that's a bit different from anything your competition has to offer.

View Social Media as an Outgrowth of Customer Service

Much like delivering excellent customer service in your law firm's office, it probably will not generate immediately recognizable short term gains.  However, just like a law firm with a bad customer service experience will likely suffer from a lack of repeat business and long-term clients, a law firm with a poor social media presence or a bad online reputation will slowly lose business to firms that are doing better in these areas.

Today, customer service can't stop when someone leaves the confines of your office.  Consider your social media presence to be the part of your customer service experience that is always available and always responsive.  It may be a good idea to assign people at your firm to monitor your social media channels during a wide range of hours—ideally 24 hours a day.  This makes it so that you always know what's going on and are never surprised first thing in the morning by a discussion that has been raging out of control on your social media channels for hours.

Finding Testimonials in Social Media Comments and Posts

One of the ways that you can use your social media presence to enhance the rest of your online reputation is to use social media comments and posts as testimonials.  Obviously, you should always talk to any person who has made a positive comment on your social media feed and obtain their express permission before using their testimonial on your website or blog.  However, this kind of comment can carry a lot of weight, especially since people attach their social media profiles to their real world identities.

You may also want to ask clients whether they might give some kind of testimonial on your Facebook wall or elsewhere in the social media world.  These testimonials can generate a lot of “likes” and other attention.  Consider asking clients to do this at about the time when they collect their settlement check—it's the time when they're likely to be most happy with your services and most likely to offer an enthusiastic recommendation on social media.

Keep in mind that not all testimonials will be equally well regarded.  A testimonial that appears overly enthusiastic or fake will often be completely disregarded by internet audiences, which can be fairly cynical.  The best testimonials will seem authentic, not like they could have been written by a PR team.

In today's United States, over 80 percent of internet users are now using some kind of social media.  With most prospective clients using the internet to find the right law firm, social media can be viewed as one of the most important aspects of your customer service policy.  It guides, to a large extent, how people will share the experience of your firm when they discuss it with friends, colleagues, or loved ones.  It's often your first point of contact with new potential clients.  And—much like with customer service—if you're not careful, it can cause problems for your firm.

Goals of Social Media for Forward-Thinking Lawyers

There's a tendency, when law firm marketers write about how law firms can use social media, to act like social media is completely revolutionary.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  While social media has certainly given people new ways to interact, in many ways, social media is simply a technological outgrowth of what used to be the public sphere.  Instead of gathering in public to share information and knowledge, people now gather online.

This means that you need to think of your social media campaigns as a way to communicate and get out your message to new audiences.  It's not just a game to be played for “likes,” friends, and comments.  Instead, social media is the best and easiest way to make your voice heard above the din of your competition.

Forward-thinking attorneys know that the success of their social media campaigns depends largely on authenticity.  Sounding inauthentic while writing social media content is one of the fastest ways to alienate connections and lose your online influence.  You should always strive for a voice that reflects, in some way, the real personality of your law firm.

Social Media is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

When some law firms start using social media, they think that tossing out a quick profile or two and updating their listings on Google Local will give them everything they need.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  While it's true that there are some things you should always do to give yourself a good start in social media, the majority of your results from these channels will come from using them consistently and thoughtfully over a long period of time.

This means that you don't need to try to build Rome in a day.  While you shouldn't make your Facebook page go live until it's ready, remember that you don't need to post all of your good ideas at once.  Pace yourself and space out your audience engagement opportunities—this will make it more easy for people to interact and less likely that your pages will be regarded as potential spam by readers.

You don't have to hover on your social media pages, either.  While it's good to monitor the conversations that are being had on your pages, sometimes it's a better idea to let those conversations evolve naturally, instead of trying to steer them or respond to every comment.  Over-responsiveness can sometimes seem almost oppressive to clients—you want to give the impression of good customer service, not a stalker.

Understanding Your Social Influence

One of the hardest things for some marketing gurus to understand about social media is that it's not always easy to compute whether you're getting worse or better at the social media game.  One way that you can tell, of course, involves asking people in client surveys how they heard about your firm.  However, this kind of survey won't detect if, for instance, people's attitudes about your firm were already more favorable because of an infographic that you posted through social media channels, or a case you won in which the news story went viral.

Integrating Social Media Platforms

You may think that when you start using social media for your law firm, you should pick one main social media platform and stick with it.  While it's usually a good idea to learn just one new social media website at a time, don't be afraid to use several different social media sites in order to help you build your web presence.  For example, you may want to post a link from your blog on Reddit or another social content aggregator.

Make sure that when you're integrating social media platforms for your law firm, you're not just parroting the exact same information on every medium.  Your medium should dictate the message to some extent.  For example, while some headlines are designed for the character limit allowed on Twitter, you wouldn't want to simply have a blog that copied all your tweets.  Let community norms dictate how you write for your audience on each of the social media websites your law firm chooses to use in your marketing efforts.

When you post to social media platforms, make sure you're not just posting what you want to see, but what your potential clients want to see.  Even if you think a topic is very basic, if it's a topic you hear a lot of questions about from new clients, it may be worth discussing in a long Facebook post or blog update.

Monitoring Social Media Trends and New Opportunities

One of the only constants in the social media landscape is that it's constantly changing.  The social media platforms that are biggest in 2013 could be completely dead by 2020, or going stronger than ever.  In order to keep from spending your marketing dollars on dying, off-trend websites, make sure that you're keeping an eye on legal marketing blogs and pages about social media.  Make your decisions based on up to date information, keeping in mind that even a year can be a long time when it comes to following internet trends.

When you do find a new trend, make sure you analyze it to make sure it has relevance to your firm specifically, not marketing or law firm marketing more generally.  Not every idea will be a good fit, and you can save time and money by directing your energy toward the platforms that work best for your firm's focus areas.

When people talk about search engines, they're often too quick to restrict the conversation to Google.  While studies show that 66 percent of web searchers use Google as their primary search engine, that still leaves a little more than a third of web users out in the cold if you're only catering to Google searches.  Doing a website submission to Bing is an easy way to make sure that Bing searchers are also able to find your content.  In this guide, we'll talk about the differences between Bing and other searches, recent changes to Bing's search algorithms, and how to do a Bing website submission when your website is ready.

What is Bing?

Like many other big early web companies, Microsoft decided that it needed to create a search engine in the late 1990s.  The first Microsoft search engine, MSN (Microsoft Network) Search, used search results from another search provider, called Inktomi.  Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft licensed the search results from other providers like Looksmart and Altavista, before deciding in the early 2000s that they needed their own search engine.

The new engine would show independent results instead of depending on another search engine's indexing capabilities.  When this search, Windows Live Search, came out, it wasn't very popular, so Microsoft went back to the drawing board and developed Bing.  Bing called itself a “decision engine” and incorporated some algorithm features that Google and Yahoo didn't have.

Do We Need Website Submission to Bing?

Bing website submission is important, because the search engine is popular and becoming moreso.  Bing's market share is now 15 percent, and that has only grown over the last two years.  If you're not doing website submission to Bing, you're not only losing out on potential clients—you're losing out on more likely to click clients.  That's because Bing's search results have tested better than Google's in most independent tests, and people seem more likely to actually click on the results they get through Bing.

When you do website submission to Bing, you'll be able to make sure that Bing searchers are getting the most recent, most up to date version of your website to preview.  This makes it much more likely that users performing a search will click on your site.

How Do We Make a Bing Website Submission?

It couldn't be much easier to do website submission to Bing.  Today, the Bing website submission process is in fact so streamlined that you can do it in just five minutes.  If you want to do more with your website on Bing searches, you may also want to take five minutes before you submit your URL to open a free Webmaster Tools account with Bing.

In order to do a website submission to Bing, you'll need to open this page: https://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster and click on “submit your site to Bing.”  Once you have done this, you can create a Bing website submission easily just by following the directions on the page.  You can expect to have to do a “captcha” to prove you're a human and not a bot in order to do website submission to Bing.

Is My Site Ready for Website Submission to Bing?

Before you do Bing website submission, you should make sure that the website you're submitting looks the way that it should.  Microsoft's search has quality guidelines, and if your website is broken or very low quality, your website submission to Bing could be automatically rejected by the search engine.

Start by making sure that your website isn't spam, and doesn't have any hidden text that could be interpreted by search engines as an attempt at over optimization.  Next, make sure before you do your Bing website submission that your website is functional in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome—you may also want to check its compatibility with older website versions.  Remember, you want to get clients, and that means seeking out people who don't necessarily have the newest and most up to date internet browsers.

Creating a Sitemap For Easier Indexing

One thing that isn't automatic about your website submission to Bing is a site index submission.  In addition to doing your normal Bing website submission, you should work on creating a site index and submitting it to Bing.  The same web address where you can submit your URL also contains detailed instructions about Bing's site index guidelines, to make your website submission to Bing easier and more painless.

Once you have created your sitemap to be in keeping with Bing's guidelines, you're ready to submit it in the same way you did your Bing website submission.  This process is very quick once your site map is done, and you will receive a confirmation from Bing once your sitemap has been received and processed.

After doing this type of website submission on Bing, it will be much easier for the search engine to monitor all of your pages for new content and make sure that users are being served previews of your most recent site version.

How Often Should We Re-Submit To Bing?

Re-doing your website submission to Bing is not always necessary.  Generally, Bing will re-index your website periodically even if you don't take any steps to do so.  However, if you have just completed a website redesign, you may want to make sure that search engines notice it right away.  In this case, you'll want to do another Bing website submission as soon as the redesign is online and fully operational.

Auto-Submission To Multiple Search Engines

If you want to combine your website submission to Bing with submissions to several other search engines, several automation programs can make this possible.  Usually, you'll just need to put in some brief information about yourself and your website's URL, and the entire process becomes fast and automated.  Only use this if you are very confident that your website meets all other quality guidelines for the search engines you're submitting to.

It's the big daddy of search engines for a reason: Google's technology innovations changed the search world forever, and it currently dominates the market with a 66% share.  With over 1 billion unique visitors worldwide doing Google searches every month, you can't afford not to do website submission to Google.  Website submission for Google is an easy and necessary part of the process of increasing your website's traffic and search engine rankings.  Keep reading to find out how to do website submission to Google, and why Google website submission should be at the top of your to-do list if you haven't done it already.

What is Google Website Submission?

When you put your website online, you may make the mistake of thinking that search engines will just find it automatically.  While it's possible to have your website indexed without website submission to Google, Google website submission ensures that your website is part of the internet Google knows about right away.  As long as when you do your website submission for Google, your website meets quality guidelines, you can find it in search results relatively soon after it is submitted.

Another part of Google website submission is site index submission.  When you do a website submission for Google, you'll only be indexing that page and the pages it is linked to.  If instead of just doing a website submission to Google, you're also giving the search engine your site index, all of the pages will be indexed and it will be substantially easier to get traffic to all parts of your website.

When Should We Start Using Google Website Submission?

While you may want to do website submission for Google right away, it's usually a good idea to check your website out first and make sure that it looks exactly the way that you want it to when Google indexes it.  Doing your website submission to Google too soon could result in needing to re-submit after fixing some of the problems you find.

To avoid this situation, try your website out on several different operating systems (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android) and more than one browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer).  By trying several different operating systems and browsers, you can be satisfied that all web users will be able to see your Google website submission, not just those using a particular piece of software.  

You should also make sure, before you do a website submission for Google, that your website is running fast.  Google, like several other search engines, takes speed into account.  If you do your website submission to Google when your hosting provider is providing slow, laggy hosting, you can expect your search engine rankings to start low and stay there.  You're much more likely to have a successful Google website submission with fast, reliable hosting.

Where Do We Do Website Submission For Google?

The URL you need to go to in order to do a Google website submission is pretty easy to remember: www.google.com/submityourcontent/.  By following the directions, you can not only start to do a website submission to Google, but also work on your site index and make sure that you're able to meet all of Google's web quality guidelines.  After you're done doing your Google website submission on this page, you may want to look around for some more Google tools to enhance your web traffic, like Google Analytics.  Unlike website submission for Google, Analytics will require you to insert a small piece of code from Google to your website so that you can verify your ownership of the site.  Website submission to Google requires no verification—after all, it's basically never a malicious thing to do to submit a website to search engines.

Why Should We Submit Our Website to Google?

Whether or not you do website submission to Google, your website will take some time to index and really start showing up in SERPs.  Every day that you aren't getting those search engine rankings is a day that you're having to spend more money on advertising to get the same number of site visitors, so it's critical to do a Google website submission in order to get it listed as quickly as possible.

Some online marketing gurus swear that doing a website submission for Google actually makes it take longer for a website to show up in search results.  Don't believe this: usually, people saying this about website submission to Google are trying to sell their own method of building search rankings and are biased against free solutions.  There's no reason to spend money you don't have to: Google website submission is fast, free, and effective.

Do We Need to Submit Our Website to Other Search Engines?

Website submission for Google is easy, and you may think that when your submission is done you don't need to keep submitting to search engines.  While it's true that Google's market share is very dominant, would you turn away 1/3 of clients who walked into your door just because they asked for directions from the wrong person?  Then why eliminate the 1/3 of web users who prefer other search engines to Google?

While website submission for Google is a great first step, it can't be the only step.  You'll also want to submit your website to Yahoo and Bing, as well as to several different directories.  This will make it much more likely that your website will be indexed fast.  Each of these search engines takes only a few minutes to submit to, much like creating a website submission to Google.

Using Auto-Submission Software

If you want to maximize your efficiency when doing website submission to Google, you can download some utility programs to help.  An auto-submission utility will do website submission for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and any other search engine you want in a matter of minutes.  The key advantage of using this kind of software is that you can get consistency—and it makes it possible to submit for several search engines in the same time that it would have taken you to just do website submission for Google in the past.

For people involved in marketing law firms using any pay per click advertising, one of the biggest changes this year has involved two Google products.  Google Analytics and AdWords can now be linked so that they work together to tell you more about whether your pay per click advertising is effective and what makes your best ads work.  These Frequently Asked Questions will help you understand whether linking Google Analytics and AdWords is a strategy your web marketing team should be considering.

What is Google AdWords?

Most attorneys who use internet advertising start with one of the most basic forms: the pay per click advertisement.  Since only people who are interested in the headline will usually click, the rates of return on these ads can sometimes be quite high (especially for longer keywords).  Google AdWords is the largest pay per click advertising program on the internet.  It allows legal marketing professionals to put their advertisements into people's Google search results.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a tool that isn't used by consumers, but instead by businesses to track how people use their websites.  After you embed a small piece of computer code into your website, Google can track how visitors behave when using your pages and when they leave.  This information can be extremely useful, because it allows you to understand which parts of your website are underperforming and how to correct performance issues with any web page on your site.

Linking Google Analytics and AdWords is a new feature that began in November 2012.  If you're not linking Google Analytics and AdWords yet, don't worry—you're not behind the curve at all yet.  Now is the perfect time to start checking out how your AdWords campaigns are performing.  Most attorneys and legal marketing professionals' current approach to the problem of AdWords analytics can be summed up as “guesswork.”  Get rid of guesswork and go for data-driven results by linking Google Analytics and AdWords.

How Do I Link Google Analytics and AdWords?

To link the two programs, just go to AdWords Help.  From there, click “Google Analytics.”  You'll see three options, and the middle one is “Link Google Analytics and AdWords.”  You'll find a solution guide that shows you with a tutorial and video how to link both of these accounts.  You'll also learn how you can start using both applications if you're not already.

What Can I Do With The Information I Get?

If you go back one level, you'll also see a third option that says “See Google Analytics data within your AdWords account.”  This helps you figure out what your AdWords campaigns are doing directly from your AdWords account, without needing to switch over to using Google Analytics.

You can take a look at your bounce rate, which indicates how many people glanced at your website only briefly, then immediately exited from the website.  You can also look at the average visit duration.  This is the amount of time, on average, that someone visiting your site stayed before moving on to another website.  You can also see how many pages an average visitor to your website looked at before leaving, and what percentage of the visitors you're receiving are new.

How Will It Help To Link Google Analytics and Adwords?

In some cases, linking Google Analytics and Adwords can help you better understand how your website is working.  For example, the fact that one of your ads sees a very poor click through rate may discourage you and make you think that it's an ineffective ad.  However, do you really know what the traffic you're getting is doing after they get to your website through Google AdWords? 

Once you link Google Analytics and AdWords, you'll be able to see whether those low click through rates are because your ad was truly uninspiring—or whether instead, it just attracted people who wanted to contact your firm, and kept people who didn't need your services out. 

How Do I Experiment With Campaigns Efficiently?

If you want to have the best results from linking Google Analytics and Adwords, you'll need to do a bit of experimentation.  You can keep basic experimental principles in mind: only change one variable at once, because if you change too many things at once it's hard to tell which change made your ad more effective.

You should set up some side by side comparisons to see whether particular techniques or phrases seem to be particularly effective in drawing people to your website, especially people who eventually schedule a consultation visit.  You can develop hypotheses about targeting your ad to particular demographic groups, or you could start experimenting with the times of day or days of the week you run the majority of your advertisements.

What If The Data Doesn't Match Predictions/Perceptions?

One of the biggest challenges for people who base some advertising dollars on a conclusion, then find out that the data doesn't bear that conclusion out, is this: do I believe the data?  I thought I was right.  Once you link Google Analytics and AdWords, you may find out that you weren't always correct about your perceptions.

Keep in mind that the data doesn't lie—data-driven websites are what get the best results today.  Remember that when one of your experiments proves a hypothesis wrong, that's actually great!  A negative answer can sometimes be just as good for your efficiency as a positive one.  By saving you from going down the wrong road with your advertising spending, following the data and taking results of your analytics at face value will help you use your marketing budget wisely.

The worst kinds of results that you can get from an efficiency perspective are ambiguous results.  This is when you see a slight increase but you're not sure if you're really just noticing statistical “noise.”  When this happens, you may need to run additional tests to determine if you're really noticing a significant factor in your advertising targeting or copy.

Let's face it, most law firms don't have the kind of budget they'd need to hire someone to do social media full time.  That means that when law firm social media marketing happens, it's usually done by someone who's wearing a lot of hats.  If you're trying to do social media marketing as part of other job duties, you need to know the biggest mistakes to avoid.  By avoiding these seven mistakes, you'll be putting your social media strategy on the right track and making sure that your law firm is ready for where social goes in the future.

#1: Not Enough Planning

Okay, so you have a Facebook profile.  And a LinkedIn.  Heck, you even still remember with a bit of fondness your college flirtation with MySpace.  You're as qualified as anyone at your firm to run social media, so why not just dive in?

The answer is, because just diving in isn't what's called for when you're trying to plan social media for a law firm.  You need to plan your social media strategy before beginning to implement it.  Too often, when social media profiles are started by someone who hasn't planned enough, they won't give any consistent brand image.  Instead, the social media profile tends to look something like the personal profile of the person who posted it, perhaps with a twist that makes it slightly more oriented toward your firm's practice area.  Planning can make it easier to differentiate your business and personal voices so that you don't sound the same.

#2: Too Much Planning

At the same time, other firms find that they're unable to get their social media strategies off the ground because they're stuck perpetually in the planning and strategy phase.  Social media moves fast—trying to plan for six months to a year and then implement a plan you started formulating a year ago is a bad move.  Odds are, everyone else has already moved on.

Keep your planning oriented toward what's going on in social media now.  By a year from now, the landscape may have changed significantly.  Have a plan for the long term that involves the image you want to project, but don't make your plan so detailed that changing it becomes a stressful necessity every time the social media world adopts new ideas.

#3: Being the Same as Everyone Else

It's important to make sure that your firm's voice isn't just the generic law firm voice.  There's too much competition both online and off today to sound identical to every law office in your town.  Think about what it is that makes you different, not what makes you a typical lawyer or a typical law office.

Too many lawyers try hard to look professional, but they come off looking generic and dull.  Being professional doesn't mean you're not allowed to have a personality.  Personality is incredibly important for differentiating yourself, so let the charm and charisma of your staff show through!  This may seem like a risk, but it's not: the bigger risk by far is being so much like everybody else that you can't get ahead, no matter how hard you try to promote your social media profiles.

#4: Ignoring Your Friends and Fans

When you post on Facebook or other social media sites, you may think that your responsibilities are done once your posts are made.  This couldn't be further from the truth.  Social media isn't just about talking, it's also about listening.  One of the fastest ways to lose your fans and friends is to just ignore them, to show that you're only interested in posting marketing material and not in interacting with potential and past clients.

Instead, make sure that you're actually responding to comments thoughtfully.  Make sure that the people who befriend you or become your fans get a short personal note from you.  These small things can make a big difference in keeping friends and fans even through difficult times.

#5: Overposting and Underposting

Deciding how often to post is difficult for almost everyone working in social media.  Overposting is a huge mistake in today's social media world, because it's very easy for people to stop following you at a moment's notice.  When someone talks about themselves incessantly, do you want to keep listening?  Probably not—and neither will your social network connections.

Underposting is just as bad.  When people see too few posts, they often start to assume that a business has fallen onto hard times or may no longer even exist.  It's critical that you don't abandon your social media profiles, because this can give the wrong impression to people trying to do research on your firm before making a call.

#6: Failing to Examine Your Results

Once you've done social media marketing for a year or two, you may think you have a good handle on it—to the point where you're not even sure if you really need to do anything differently.  However, analyzing your results is incredibly critical if you want to be able to continue improving.  Without continuous improvement, you're likely to find your competition rapidly catching up to you—then going on straight past you.

Consider downloading some basic analytics tools to help you look at how people get to your website from social media channels and what they do when they get there.  This can help you understand what parts of your social media strategy have been most and least effective, and what you should do more in the future.

#7: Wishful Thinking

When you decide that your social media strategy should work, it can be really hard to let go if you're not seeing results.  Wishful thinking—wanting a strategy to work so badly that your confirmation bias starts telling you that it works just fine—is one of the biggest enemies of data-driven marketing.

Take yourself and your ego out of the equation.  If one strategy isn't successful, it's not a mark against you.  It's an opportunity to try something different.

Branding isn't a word that gets most lawyers excited.  You may think of boring marketing meetings and What may surprise you is that building your brand, when you do it in an authentic way, can not only help your bottom line—it can help you find your identity as a firm.  In this guide, we'll explore seven different ways that you can build not just a brand, but a brand that is differentiated from your competition and that helps inspire pride in your organization.

#1: Don't Just Tell People Who You Are—Show Them

Online content is like any other written or visual content—it's better to show than to tell.  Instead of just telling people about your qualifications and the numbers of your practice, try telling stories instead.  Narratives can make a huge difference in how people perceive your firm.  The right narrative can make you look compassionate, interesting, and like a better deal than your competitors.

Consider having a brainstorming meeting with your staff to think about the best stories that come from your firm—the ones that seem to you to be the stories that best illustrate your biggest strengths.  Understanding your firm's stories and sharing them with the world can make it much easier for your entire organization to understand where your branding is coming from.  This in turn makes it more likely that your staff can perpetuate your brand image in both the online and offline worlds.

#2: Don't Bore Your Fans and Friends

People read what interests them.  Sometimes, that's a social media post—but if your social media posts look like they're all the same, if you have the same few things you post about all the time, you're going to get awfully boring, awfully quickly.  Vary up what you say on social media channels so that people don't get bored stiff within weeks of subscribing to your content.

You should also avoid posting too much, for this same reason.  Even if your posts are really phenomenal, odds are that people don't want you to monopolize their social content feeds.  You'll be more well regarded if you keep your posts regular but not too frequent.

#3: Different Audiences, Same Core Message

Even though LinkedIn and Facebook, for example, are very different places to post social media content, that doesn't mean your message shouldn't be similar.  Recognize that different audiences should hear the same basic brand behind your message, even if you're communicating that message differently to people with different levels of understanding of the legal issues involved with your practice.

Make sure that even if your content is fairly different, that at its core it projects the same values.  You don't want to pitch a new, zany law firm with your Facebook posts and try to seem staid and old-fashioned on LinkedIn.  That's not the kind of audience adaptability that gets you new clients—just the kind that dilutes your brand and makes your staff unsure of how to position themselves in relation to your brand.

#4: Explore Who People Think You Are

When trying to decide on your own branding initiatives online, consider asking former clients about their experiences and seeing what they have to say.  Understanding what other people say about you can be as important as knowing what you want to say about yourself.

Ideally, your brand vision should incorporate these things that you find out through your clients, as well as the things you think about yourselves.  Some of the stories you hear from clients may become great client testimonials, which you can use as content on social media websites or on your law firm website.

#5: Build Long Term Loyalty

The best clients are the ones who become yours for life.  You don't just want a little bit of short term brand loyalty when you're working for a law firm.  You need to work on the kind of excellent social media responsiveness that makes people talk and makes them remember—not just for a few weeks or months.

When you give truly exceptional customer service, you can generate not just viral buzz but also long-term relationships with individual clients.  Keep in mind that every time you respond on social media, you're potentially making an impression that could lead to a long term attorney/client relationship.  Long relationships are now one of the biggest buzzwords in social media, and cultivating loyalty is both one of the most difficult and also the most rewarding things you can do for your brand image.  A loyal client will not just come to your law firm, but will recommend other people do so as well.

#6: Stay Focused on Your Goals

Once you have your brand identity, remember to keep your vision.  While it's fine to incorporate great ideas from competitors, make sure that you don't give in to the temptation to do things just like a competitor who is doing well.  Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it's also a bad way to differentiate yourself.

Periodically, you should consider talking to a small team in your staff about whether your brand needs to be changed and whether your visionary is doing what it needs to.  However, don't second-guess yourself too often, and don't change your brand image so often that it feels like whiplash to your clients.

#7: Pay Attention to Client Concerns

It's absolutely critical to listen to what your clients are saying about your brand.  Even if your clients are saying negative things and the buzz about you isn't what you want—you still want to know what they're saying.  It doesn't help to put your head into the sand.  In fact, if you are responsive to what people say about their concerns, you can actually turn a negative into positive.  Too often, people are used to being ignored.  If you show that you honestly do care, you can sometimes create a loyal client.

Historically, one of the biggest ways that law firms have built their web presence is through link exchange.  Web link exchange is an old and time-tested method for building links, but in 2012, web design link exchange doesn't always work.  If you are considering exchanging links with one or more other websites, there are things your firm needs to know so that you don't end up in trouble with Google and other search engines.  In this guide, you'll learn the basics of web design link exchange so that you can work on your own exchanges that won't be detected by Google.

What is Web Link Exchange?

When people want to build links, it's usually so that they can make their search rankings better.  Web link exchange makes it so that building links can be mutually beneficial to both parties.  Ideally, web design link exchange will be contextual—that is, you'll be talking about the same things on your website that your linking partner is talking about on theirs.  This makes web link exchange significantly more beneficial for your search rankings.

Using Web Link Exchange: The Early Years

When people began to use web design link exchange, the internet was still very young and search engines were still quite primitive in comparison to today's sophisticated algorithms.  Before Google, many web searches based their search rankings primarily on keyword densities, but Google started also looking at inbound link numbers.

When webmasters realized that having more inbound links meant a quick rise in their rankings, they hurried to start the practice that we now know as web link exchange.  At first, web design link exchange started on a very casual, ad hoc level: people who knew each other or who had personally enjoyed another website emailed an offer to exchange links, and that was that.  However, web link exchange was about to get monetized—and that would change the face of the internet, and search engines, forever.

What Happened To Using Web Link Exchange?

When web design link exchange was used only among people who knew each other, and was done on very small scales, it wasn't really looked down upon by search engines.  As link exchange began to become a business enterprise, though, search engines sat up and took notice.  Google bans the buying and selling of links, and web design link exchange seemed largely about circumventing those guidelines.

When people began to use free web link exchange, it made it so that just anybody could have a very large inbound link presence, as long as they were willing to devote enough time to their link generation tools and reciprocal linking.  This kind of overuse made it so that search results started getting worse, giving people web design link exchange spam instead of the results they were actually looking for.

To combat the continued practice of automated web link exchange, Google decided to start punishing websites that seemed to be abusing link exchanges for rankings purposes.  Web design link exchange that appeared to be unnatural—judged by the percentage of reciprocal links as opposed to one way links—was lowered in the rankings artificially to compensate for the effect that the link exchanges were having.

Should We Use Web Link Exchange Today?

If you're thinking about using any kind of web design link exchange today, you need to give some very serious thought to why you're using it and what other kinds of links you'll be creating in addition to those reciprocal links.

It's still very much possible to use a web link exchange successfully.  However, you'll need to keep your ratio of reciprocal links relatively small.  In general, commit to creating three one way inbound links for every link that you create through a web design link exchange.

You should avoid using any kind of web link exchange that relies solely or primarily upon automated exchange.  While it's a bit more work to create the links yourself and rely on links from websites you've actually visited, these links will also be more valuable and maintain their value longer.  Automated links from any web design link exchange are very easy to detect, and Google routinely devalues links from known web link exchange services.

How Will Our Website Be Affected by Web Link Exchange?

If you used the kinds of web design link exchange strategies we've outlined above, your website should slowly start to increase in popularity and in search rankings.  You should consistently use some kind of analytics application so that you can keep track of which of the links you're building is bringing in the most direct traffic to your website.

If you don't follow the guidelines above, though, it's very likely that Google will notice that you have chosen to use some form of automated web link exchange.  If this happens, you'll receive notice about the links in question, and information about how to stop penalties from occurring to your website.  Typically you'll need to have the links taken down, or at least prove to Google that you've made a serious effort to do so.  This kind of proof can be difficult to assemble, so it's honestly better to just never make links through automated web link exchange services—ever.

Ways to Do Web Link Exchange in 2012

There are still a few great ways to do web design link exchange in 2012.  For example, it can sometimes be beneficial to websites to accept awards, then reciprocate a link to the awarding site on their website.  As long as you don't overdo it with this kind of reciprocal linking, some web link exchange will be just fine—especially if they're awards or other types of contextual linking that makes sense on your website.

You can also do some types of link exchange by using social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter.  These sites allow easy sharing of links that makes it substantially easier for people to connect to your content and exchange links with each other.