This article first appeared in the March 2012 edition of the Family Law Journal. It is a basic guide to the opportunities that social media affords to family lawyers, and was the precursor to my current round of training sessions for Resolution on using social media and making it part of your business development strategy.
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Knowledge, understood
A new business development strategy for family lawyers
Suzy Ashworth explains why it’s time for family lawyers to hop aboard the social media bus
This article first appeared in March 2012’s Family Law Journal
Devising business development strategies for promoting family law services is tricky. It’s not
considered appropriate to approach people directly and ask if they want a divorce; you have to be
subtle, indirect, and a little bit clever to reach the clients you want. Historically we, as a profession,
have targeted our efforts at those in a ‘trusted family adviser’ position, believing that these people
are those most likely to be asked to recommend a family lawyer when their clients need one. We are
used to using our network of contacts to target our marketing efforts. However, there are new ways
of networking and marketing that family lawyers can harness to develop their business. Social
media and the internet can cement relationships and reach audiences never before imagined. This
article introduces these tools and explains the benefits of participation.
However, that’s not to say that old-style family law marketing has all gone out of the window.
Personal networking is probably still the best method of growing your business. In a profession
where everyone is a potential client and a potential referrer of work, you have the chance to market
yourself everywhere you go, making it easy to fit networking efforts into daily life. You can do it at
the gym, at the golf club, at the school gates, at a charity event, at your daughter’s friend’s birthday
party. It starts with being friendly, chatting to people, eventually making reference to what you do
for a living, and answering the questions they ask you about it with integrity and grace. The greater
the number of people whom you meet, chat to, and connect with, the more likely that someone will
remember your name for a friend in need, and pass it on. Following up on the contacts you make is
essential, however, to ensure that the efforts you make to connect with people are not ultimately
left to wither away to nothing.
Using social media can assist with developing your business via networking (ie expanding who you
know) and marketing (ie getting your message across) by making it easier to find new contacts, keep
in touch with them, and tell them about yourself. And best of all: they’re free!
What are social media?
Social media are channels of communications using the internet that contain user-generated content
for public consumption, enabling people to engage in a discussion or to be part of a community. The
easiest way to participate is by using specific social media websites. There are many of these, but
the most important channels for the family lawyer are currently LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) and
Twitter (www.twitter.com).
On 20 December 2011 the Law Society released a Practice Note on social media, reminding those
using these channels that their professional obligations must be met at all times, particularly in
terms of client confidentiality. The Practice Note also contains some helpful pointers on what
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2. individual firms should be doing to ensure that their social media output represents them in the best
way possible, and to protect them from pitfalls.
Social media present three main areas of opportunity for the family lawyer: they are marketing
tools, they give networking a new dimension, and they assist with keeping up-to-date.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the biggest online network for professionals. It claims to have over 120million members
worldwide. LinkedIn has two main functions: for marketing purposes, it acts as a virtual CV or a
personal shopfront, and from a networking angle it enables you to keep track of and interact with
professional connections. There is also scope to post links to articles, blogs or other content within
LinkedIn and to update people on matters of interest.
In terms of marketing, the most important part of LinkedIn is your personal profile. If you’re going to
engage with LinkedIn, it’s important to set up your profile well: search engines love the site and a
LinkedIn profile will come high up in the Google results when someone searches the internet for
your name (as your clients, potential clients, collaborators and opponents already do, all the time!).
The key elements are a good, clear, professional picture and a headline that shows what you do and
uses the keywords that people might use to find someone like you. If you can be more creative
about defining your work in your headline, you will stand out better from the crowd. The bulk of the
rest of your profile offers the opportunity to present your work philosophy in an attractive way, to
showcase your experience and illustrate your qualifications.
The other marketing opportunity LinkedIn presents is in the ability to ask others to recommend your
work, and display these references on your profile. References are hugely powerful for clients in
their decision-making process, and people are used to finding recommendations on the internet for
hotels, restaurants, books and films. You will know from your own experience that if someone has
said something good about a service, even if you don’t know them personally, you are likely to find it
reassuring when you are making a choice whether or not to buy. Although it is perhaps rare that
you would be connected directly to a client on LinkedIn, and even rarer that such a client would be
willing to write a recommendation of your family law services that could be seen publicly on your
LinkedIn page, you may find that references from other professional contacts with whom you have
worked are nearly as powerful in building for a potential client a picture of who you are, and how
you might help them. Plus, you only display references you choose to display.
LinkedIn is useful for firms too. It is very simple to set up a ‘company page’ containing links to the
profiles of your partners and employees, information about your services, and updates about what
the firm is doing. Again, this is a useful source of information for potential clients, although a
commitment is required to make the LinkedIn offering sufficiently slick and professional, and
reflective of your firm’s ethos. Like individual profiles, it is not something to be done half-heartedly.
LinkedIn really comes into its own for professional networking. The idea is that you invite people
whom you know to “connect” with you. Once connected, you are able to see all of that connection’s
contacts (what LinkedIn calls 2nd degree connections). If you need a recommendation of a
professional person to perform a particular function, you can ask people in your network to
recommend someone in theirs. It also means that you can see who knows whom. If there is a
Our PSL Ltd is a company incorporated in England & Wales with company number 7378116.
Registered office: Tyburn House, Station Road, Oakington, Cambridgeshire CB24 3AH.
3. contact you have been trying to make for a while, and you have a connection in common, you can
ask for a personal introduction.
The real opportunities that can flow from LinkedIn come from using it to keep in touch with your
contacts, share knowledge and experience, and let people know what you are up to. There’s scope
to be creative, to post articles and blogs, and answer and ask questions in the groups (of which there
are many specifically aimed at family lawyers). This is where networking and marketing collide and
meld into a holistic business development strategy: all of this work increases your internet presence
and visibility, and is an easy and free way of reminding your professional contacts how expert you
are, how interesting, and how nice a person.
Twitter
Twitter is an information network. Users communicate with each other using ‘tweets’ of 140
characters or less, which are often short opinions, activity updates or links to longer pieces of
information like blogs, event invitations, or news reports. You get information from people if you
‘follow’ them. If you do so, all of their tweets will appear on your homepage, which automatically
updates every minute or so to keep you bang up-to-date. If someone follows you, they get all of
your tweets; however, people don’t have to follow you to see your tweets: you can look up
someone’s profile and see everything they have ever put on Twitter without following them.
You don’t have to contribute to Twitter to use it. You can simply treat it as an information source,
like you would a newspaper or magazine, following the feeds of whatever interests you without ever
tweeting yourself. Twitter’s usefulness for family law updating is huge: many of the big family law
publishers, policymakers, solicitors and barristers have Twitter accounts and there’s plenty of
potential for picking up information as soon as it’s released. This also makes it good for networking:
you can send a tweet to anyone on Twitter, and reply to what they’ve said, making connections with
people you might never meet in real life. However, Twitter’s greatest potential for family lawyers is
as a marketing tool because it enables you to reach massive numbers of people if you have
something interesting to say, and it’s all for free.
The greatest reach comes from retweets: this is sending on to your followers an interesting tweet
from someone you follow. So if you tweet something to, say, your 200 followers, but two of your
followers find it interesting and each send it on to, say, 500 followers, leading to one of those to
send it on to perhaps 20,000 followers etc, the potential for coming to the attention of such a huge
number of people is something that would otherwise require you to pay many thousands of pounds
in advertising costs. The trick, of course, is to find something interesting to say, but this is another
bonus of family law: the world finds relationships interesting, and there is always something to talk
about.
Most conversations on Twitter are public, and it is important to be aware that whatever you say has
the effect of being shouted through a megaphone. It is not generally a place for personal
conversations or extended interactions with a particular contact, which followers may find annoying.
However, Twitter also enables you to send private direct messages to people who follow you – this is
more like using a telephone than a megaphone, if you want to continue a conversation more
personally, for example, or cement a new networking contact by arranging to connect on LinkedIn or
to meet up for a coffee.
Our PSL Ltd is a company incorporated in England & Wales with company number 7378116.
Registered office: Tyburn House, Station Road, Oakington, Cambridgeshire CB24 3AH.
4. Conclusion
Family law services are so personal in nature that making a real connection with a client is often the
most important thing. Using social media well can take your personal business development efforts
to another level of success. It’s free, and it needn’t take too much of your time. For family lawyers,
the opportunities for business development presented by social media are just too good to ignore.
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In brief:
Using LinkedIn for business development
Constantly keep your profile under review. Look at other people’s and collect ideas for how
to improve yours.
Try to add an activity or link to an article at least each week to remain visible to your
contacts and keep your profile fresh.
Make it personal. Rather than using the standard ‘invitation’ email add a sentence
explaining why you’d like to connect.
Aim to connect with people in your local area: ask for introductions via your existing
connections.
Be open to making connections with people you don’t know (within reason). Send an
acceptance explaining a little bit about who you are and what you do, and offering a chat on
the phone if what you do is of interest to them.
Answer questions in groups that interest you and get involved in discussions to raise your
profile and gain credibility.
Take it offline: combine LinkedIn with meeting for a coffee occasionally to cement your
professional relationship.
Remember to turn off your broadcast settings (in ‘settings’ at the top right corner of the
screen) before making a lot of changes to your profile.
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Using Twitter for business development
Twitter is a fantastic source of information about local events and local trends – it gives you
ideas for where you can take your personal networking and marketing efforts.
Remember your business development aims, but don’t be afraid to show a little bit of who
you are. People respond to self-disclosure so tweet about what interests you.
Use Twitter as a gateway to your blog or firm’s website: tweet the links, but try to be more
than a blog feed or your followers will lose interest.
Our PSL Ltd is a company incorporated in England & Wales with company number 7378116.
Registered office: Tyburn House, Station Road, Oakington, Cambridgeshire CB24 3AH.
