Marketing experts recommend that to gain visibility and get traffic to your firm’s website, you should maintain a blog and participate in social media. But for attorneys in firms of all sizes, especially small firms and solo practices, it can be a challenge to find the time to properly manage these activities and develop professional quality content that provides value to readers and followers while at the same time managing your clients, your cases, and your practice.
Personally engaging in these activities is the gold standard; writing your own posts creates a greater connection with your audience because the audience feels as if you are speaking directly to them. But it requires a regular commitment of time. However, there are ways that you can delegate or outsource some of the work of creating an active and engaged blog and social media presence to reduce some of the burden on you, while still gaining the benefits of participation.
Ways to Delegate Blogging and Social Media Tasks
For example, you could hire a writer to do some repurposing for you – taking some of your existing materials or writing and developing blog posts and social media posts or campaigns around them. If you have written a legal brief, a writer may be able to turn the writing you’ve done for a legal audience (the court) into writing on the same topic for a different audience – potential clients or referral sources – by explaining the legal concepts to a lay audience and breaking down your brief into a series of blog posts.
Or you could also ask someone to interview you about a timely topic or a story in the news. That interview could become a podcast or audio posted to your website, and the transcript of the interview could be transcribed into text as a blog post. You could also have a writer expand a bit on some of what you discuss in the interview.
You can also ask others to write guest posts for your blog. They can be other lawyers, clients, experts, or other service providers. Guest posts are a win- win: they provide the guest poster with increased visibility and access to your audience, and give your audience a different perspective or new information that you might not be able to provide on your own, while reducing the frequency with which you have to create your own content. (You may want to include a disclaimer on these posts and make it clear they are written by third parties and represent their views, and not necessarily yours.)
Other Blogging and Social Media Tasks to Delegate or Outsource
Other tasks you can delegate or outsource include:
- Conducting basic research
- Identifying of story ideas or news items as the basis for posts
- Maintaining an editorial calendar
- Developing a first draft of a post based on some bullet points or a topic idea you provide
- Suggesting other blogs to follow or link to
- Setting up a blogs or social media accounts
- Proofreading and editing
- Reviewing analytics and post performance
- Posting links to articles, blog posts or to your website on social media
For those that don’t have the time or don’t want to actually write themselves, but still want to maintain a blog or social media accounts, using a ghostwriter or subscribing to a blogging service may solve the problem. But you’ll want to be sure that their writing fits with your firm’s style, voice, and the image you’re trying to project.
Checking on Style
If you decide to hire others to write for your blog or post to your social media accounts, do a trial run and check their writing style:
- Does the writer’s style match yours?
- Does it convey the impression you want to convey?
- Does their language reflect the language you use with clients?
- Does their writing reflect your philosophy and values as a lawyer?
- Does it reflect your personality? Is it more or less formal, conversational, lighthearted, humorous, etc. than you usually are?
- Are posts written specifically to connect with your target audience?
Using outside services to write or post for you may raise some additional issues you should be aware of, including potential ethical issues. For example, having someone else writing blog posts in the lawyer’s name could be potentially misleading. And posting about clients or cases could run afoul of confidentiality rules. In my next post, I'll give you some tips and things to think about when choosing a ghostwriter, outside service or employee to run your blog or social media activities. (Hint: you'll still need to be involved).
For more on blogs and ghostwriting, see my posts Should You Use a Ghostwriter for Your Blog and Ghostwriting and Legal Blogs or my post on the Lawyerist blog, Outsourcing Blogs and Social Media.
These tips are amazing as being a law student this kind of articles really helps me out and increases my knowledge and I want to appreciate you for sharing and helping me out :)
Posted by: Ethan Garofalo | March 02, 2017 at 03:50 AM
Thanks for sharing these tips, now a days the trend of social media has increased. This article is helpful for those who are looking forward to make an online presence.
Posted by: Annie | February 02, 2017 at 03:00 AM