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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're new to the social media world, or if you just think that your current social media strategy could use some sprucing up, you've come to the right place.  Over 90 percent of law firms today now use social media and report that they plan to continue using it in 2013.  However, not all social media marketing works equally well.  Too many law firms spend a lot of time posting to social media sites, without having a really clear vision of what they're doing with social media or how it can be leveraged most effectively.  Here, we'll look at seven different ways that you can make sure your social media efforts aren't wasted.

#1: Expect And Plan For Change

If you're expecting social media to stay still for long enough for you to get a handle on it, you need to give up on that goal right now.  Social media has been changing so rapidly that the truth is, there's still a lot of room to learn, and no one knows everything that's going on in the social world.

Instead of trying to just learn how to do things one way, the biggest buzzword for social media campaigns needs to be “flexibility.”  The more flexible you are about changing where you focus your social media and what kinds of content work best, the less often you'll be caught unable to adapt to the constantly changing social media scene.

#2: Keep Up With Recent Developments

One of the biggest ways to make sure that new developments don't throw you off guard is to spend time every single week looking at articles and other content about social media marketing.  By reading blogs and other websites that discuss how to use social media most effectively, you'll be able to see the best, up to the minute places to put your content.

You should also keep track of what other companies and law firms are doing for their social media.  Some blogs cover when companies do particularly well—or particularly poorly—with social media platforms.  You can often use these to get ideas for what to do—and sometimes get ideas about what NOT to do.

#3: Don't Hold On To Old Ideas

Because of the constantly changing face of social media, you need to be ready to discard ideas that don't work.  This includes ideas that used to work and no longer do.  For example, one of the biggest traditional ways to do law firm advertising is to use traditional search engine optimization with keywords.

However, while traditional SEO worked very well for some law firms for some time, today social media is much more important.  It's possible that in a few years, the internet will have changed enough that you need to start taking your time with some other kind of website rather than social sites.  Learning to let go, even of the things that work for some time, can give you the adaptability edge you need to be more competitive in the legal market.

#4: Use Social Media to Engage, Not Just Promote

People who are used to traditional forms of marketing often miss the point of social media.  Instead of using social sites to drive client and viewer engagement, many attorneys think that the best way to use social media is simply to talk about themselves and use the same kinds of advertising techniques that might have worked in television or radio.

But social media isn't radio or television—it's something very different with very different purposes.  When you put a commercial on TV, a conversation about your practice won't develop.  When you talk on Facebook, though, it's very possible that several people will start buzz about your post within just an hour or two.  This means that you want to not just talk, but to start two-way conversations.  If you only talk, you're missing more than half the potential that social media has to offer.

#5: Don't Expect Immediate Results

If you think that social media will immediately light up your phone lines, you are going to be disappointed.  There's simply no way for social media to give you the same kind of immediate results that some forms of advertising, like pay per click browser ads or television, can do.

However, when you use social media, you're building relationships.  That means that even if it takes longer to get results, the results you get will be better and longer lasting.  Once a commercial airs, it's just gone—a social media profile that has been built from conversations is something that stays, a place where people can see exactly why they should call you based on how you interact with people who have questions or concerns.

#6: Know Your Social Media Audiences

Make sure that you're not just copying the same exact lines from your posts on one website and posting them to another.  Every social media website is a little bit different, and by making sure that you're targeting the actual audiences that you can reach on each site, you'll be using your time more effectively.

Keep in mind that you will probably have some people who follow you on several different social media sites.  To avoid fatiguing these people or having them stop following you on one or more sites, make sure that you're posting unique content to each.

#7: Stay Aware of Comments and Posts

Don't just start thinking that it's too difficult to read all of your comments.  You may want to download a social media manager program that can help you read all of your comments that come in, so that you don't have to try to use piecemeal solutions requiring checking several different websites.

Keep in mind that both overmoderation and undermoderation are a problem.  If you moderate too much, you create a chilling effect and make it so that people feel like they can't really get a conversation started with others.  However, if you undermoderate, you risk people saying offensive things that could lead potential clients to be turned off.  Keep offensive or negative content deleted, and try to only pop in to comment when you're asked a question or really need to moderate a discussion.

Over 80 percent of law firms now have a social media presence, and the social networking trend shows no signs of subsiding yet.  Instead, social media has become part of people's lives who traditionally have not been in “techie” demographics, including older people and women.  While no law firm needs to use every social networking website out there (for instance, there aren't a lot of great ways for attorneys to use Pinterest), you should be at least considering a social media presence that goes beyond a blog.  Here are seven of the best social media networks for attorneys, as well as the reasons that your law firm might want to develop a presence on each one of these websites.

#1: Facebook

The granddaddy of all social behemoths, Facebook is still by far the most commonly used social networking website in the world.  If your law firm isn't already on Facebook, you're in a minority: most firms, as of 2012, have at least one page for their law office.

Facebook has a huge number of tools available for interacting with social followers.  In addition to making posts and comments, you can also promote posts, making sure that they are viewed by everyone who has you friended.  If you want to expand your social reach or get more people visiting your website, you can use Facebook's pay per click advertising platform to target the exact types of clients you're looking for.  In fact, you can even use this advertising to target friends of friends, who are statistically significantly more likely to click on your ads because they'll see that you're already liked by someone they know and trust.

#2: Youtube

Even a decade ago, incorporating video into your website and online presence could be difficult and costly.  Bandwidth costs for video were one of the biggest problems, until Youtube came on the scene.  Using Youtube, users can upload videos about anything (as long as they abide by some fairly basic content restrictions to prevent obscene or copyrighted material from being used on the site).

Consider using Youtube to host videos that you can then cross-promote on a wide variety of social media platforms.  Don't just make videos that look like a television advertisement.  Consider creating videos that inform people about legal concepts that people commonly have trouble with.  You should also consider using some humor in your Youtube videos—don't be too cheesy, because you always want to be thought of as professional, but don't be afraid to make people laugh.

#3: LinkedIn

While LinkedIn used to be the gold standard of social media for attorneys, today the site is actually losing ground in some ways.  LinkedIn is still one of the best websites that your law firm can use if you're primarily a B2B firm.  Because a huge number of businesses and businesspeople are on LinkedIn, it is perhaps the easiest way to get into contact with large numbers of people in your address book, as well as making new networking connections to people in your industry.

However, recent studies have shown that LinkedIn is losing ground, even in the B2B market, to competitors like Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+.  Because of this, while you should still maintain a LinkedIn presence, it's time to realize that LinkedIn alone is simply not enough connection to the social media world to keep you competitive.

#4: Twitter

Recent surveys have shown that Twitter is actually by far the most effective way to get new connections to other businesses.  A survey of law firms showed that Twitter may be as much as 9 times as effective at getting new B2B connections as LinkedIn or Facebook.  If you haven't learned how to use Twitter yet, today's the day—the easy to use interface makes it a cinch to pick up even if you're not familiar with the system yet.

Make sure that when you're posting to Twitter, you're not reposting all of your Twitter posts to all of your other social media feeds.  Because Twitter can sometimes have more posts than other types of social media, if your tweets flood your Facebook and Google+ feed, you're likely to see a lot of followers and friends dropping off the map.

#5: Google+

While it's fine to use Google+ if you have extra time to use social media, the truth is that this service hasn't yet lived up to the hype that accompanied it.  Some current studies show that there are now more active Google+ users than Twitter users, but this is based on a definition of “active user” that includes many Google+ users who are not using their account in any way that could be considered social networking from a marketing perspective.

Although Google+ still isn't meeting expectations of some social media gurus, it's a good idea to keep an eye on it.  Changes to other social networks or better functionalities for Google+ could make it a more popular platform in the future.

#6: Reddit

If you're looking to show off something that you've written, Reddit should be one of your first stops.  You can submit any link to this website that meets its content guidelines.  Users then vote on which links are good and bad. If people like your content, they'll upvote it, making it more visible to more users on the site.

When using Reddit, it's critically important to submit links to the best “subreddit” possible.  Each subforum in Reddit's website can be subscribed to by different users, and the most popular subreddits can get you big rewards—but won't pay off as often.  Smaller subreddits can sometimes be a better way to get specialized content disseminated.  Consider using a subreddit that's specifically for the area of law you practice.

#7: FourSquare

The only one of the local “tagging” services still relevant in 2013, you may want to consider joining FourSquare if your law offices are in an urban area with many FourSquare tags.  Consider doing something creative, like tagging areas in your city that are relevant to your legal practice area.

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.

If you've been keeping up with legal marketing news, you've almost definitely heard of article submission websites—they were the most commonly used SEO tool for many law firms for several years in the mid-'00s.  An article submission website works by letting you submit any content you like, then builds links to your websits based on your article and inserts the article's content into several websites all over the internet.  But is this still a good idea in 2012?  Today, we'll take a look at whether the humble article submission website is still a great marketing bet, or whether it has been eclipsed in favor of newer methods.

Inbound Linking and Article Submission Websites

The purpose of an article submission website is simple.  Search engine rankings depend more on inbound links than on any other single factor.  This puts many different websites into competition for who can get the most inbound “link juice,” which helps Google decide how much authority your website has when you talk about particular topics.

Article submission websites can give you anywhere from one to hundreds of inbound links, and depending on which article submission website you choose, you can automate some or all of the process.  In order to have the best chance of your links working well, you'll also want to make sure that the content you produce is worth clicking on.  The more people that link to the page with your inbound link on it, the more authority that link will have.

How Article Submission Websites Work

Typically, to use an article submission website, you'll need to have your content ready to go.  After registering for an account, you'll be able to upload your content, including links with anchor text, to the website.

After you upload to an article submission website, the site begins to spawn copies of your article on other websites owned by the same company or which allow for public access and posting.  Because you've included a link with anchor text in the articles you submit with article submission websites, that article is placed in many places all over the web.

Problems with Article Submission Websites

Problems can arise if you're using an article submission website, because Google doesn't particularly like when people try to game search rankings.  If you wanted to be on Page 1, Google would much prefer for you to do it by paying them for a sponsored link rather than doing it for free or nearly free through article submission websites.

Because of this, Google has started doing things to identify when someone is using an article submission website.  An algorithm update called Panda started devaluing links that were made directly from publicly accessible article submission websites in late 2011.  In 2012, another algorithm update called Penguin started being used.  This update made it so that websites that were getting too many links with the same anchor text were penalized for over optimization.

What this meant for many article submission websites was disaster.  Not all of them survived the changes, and many webmasters who thought they had done a good job with search engine optimization suddenly found themselves the not so proud owners of websites with terrible SERPs.

Article Submission Websites in the Panda/Penguin Era

For any article submission website to make it after Panda and Penguin, they had to be savvy and adapt to the changing times.  Today, article submission websites are more likely to post your content to contextually relevant sites, to vary anchor text, and to insert your links on high PageRank sites instead of low value ones.

Now that Penguin and Panda have been used for some time, the best way to make sure that any article submission website you're using still works is to just ask them for their data.  They should be able to show you that they have had measurable post-Penguin success, and if not, you should probably find other article submission websites with a more data driven approach.

While in the “old days” of 2007 or 2008, you could pick just about any article submission website, today you're going to need to be more picky.  You should also make sure that you're diversifying your link creation strategy: while article submission websites can certainly help, you will also need to have several other strategies in case a new algorithm update renders your links useless.

Should We Still Use Article Submission Websites?

Even with the potential problems of using an article submission website, they can still be a really good strategy for building inbound links.  Just make sure that you're going through quality article submission websites with good results, and the risk/reward ratio is good enough that many marketers think it's worth doing.

No one can make the decision for you about whether to use an article submission website, but perhaps some of your decision should be based on how much you have to lose.  An older, established law firm with a big web presence should probably use more conservative strategies and may not want to use article submission websites.  On the other hand, for a brand new firm, using an article submission website presents a whole lot of opportunities for reward and is very unlikely to damage your reputation overall.

Alternatives to Article Submission Websites

If using an article submission website makes you a bit wary, there are other ways that you can build your links without taking the same risks.  Consider using an advertising agency to help you draft press releases, and make contacts in the journalism industry so that your press releases are more likely to be picked up by local newspapers, radio stations, and television channels.

You can also create inbound links using directory submissions, social media, or blogging.  These methods are now time tested, and you should be incorporating them as part of your inbound link building strategy whether or not you use article submission websites.  Any article submission website you use will be more useful when you're also maintaining a diverse variety of links on other types of sites.