How Lawyers Can Use Social Media to Grow Their Practice and Build Community Trust
- An effective social media strategy helps attorneys increase visibility, establish authority, and connect with potential clients by sharing educational content, engaging visuals, and client-focused messaging across platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Creating strong, client-focused profiles and publishing consistent, relevant content—from FAQs to community conversations and infographics—makes your law firm stand out and stay top of mind.
- With the right tools, lawyers can simplify content creation, amplify reach, and stay compliant with industry regulations—turning social media from a time-consuming chore into a growth engine.
As an attorney, you deal with people who need your help every day, often with many questions, countless concerns, and dire situations. You know you can offer solutions and bring peace of mind. Now, you just need to encourage people to become your clients. Having a robust social media strategy for lawyers enables you to share your knowledge (within limits) and build a strong reputation within your community and online.
What you should know about social media for lawyers:
- If you are not connecting with clients and the community through social media now, chances are good you’re missing key opportunities.
- Having a social media strategy for lawyers must be consistent to gain traction and be built around meaningful content.
- With a few tips for lawyers on social media use, you can easily fit this component of social marketing into your workday without taking time away from your practice.
To achieve your goals, you’ll need to develop a social media strategy that provides a framework for your success. Follow these tips for social media marketing as a lawyer.
Create Interesting, Memorable Social Media Pages
Social media marketing for lawyers should start with a solid foundation. That’s your social media pages. This should include:
- LinkedIn profiles for each attorney and the law firm
- Facebook pages for your firm
- YouTube to post long-form content to answer questions and build a following
- TikTok and Instagram for short-form content
As a lawyer, your ideal client likely expects you to be knowledgeable and an expert at what you do, whether that is family law, personal injury, or commercial law. At the same time, they are looking for an attorney they can engage with, someone who can take hard and complex legal topics and break them down into meaningful bites of information that they can actually use.
Create your social media profiles with the following in mind:
- Make sure you are client-focused. Help them with their needs and problems.
- Use real pictures of you, your attorneys, your law offices, and the community.
- Engage in community conversations that are meaningful to those who use your services.
- Use professional language that meets all of the American Bar Association legal requirements.
- Use visuals! Photos and videos, even if you don’t want to speak on camera, are far more likely to be shared than text posts.
These tips allow you to begin creating a presence online. That in itself is going to help you build your following. However, once your pages are in place, you still need to communicate your presence to get the likes and followers necessary.
Building Your Law Firm’s Social Media Strategy
Your law firm’s social media strategy should include several components that allow you to build a presence online through consistency and brand-focused communication. There are several key elements to this process:
Define Your Target Client
Who is it that you want to work with on a consistent basis? Consider demographics as well as where they live. By creating a very specific profile of your ideal clients, you can begin to develop content that’s geared towards them and position that content where your clients will see it.
Understand Your Clients’ Needs
What you know they need is different from what the client actually needs. In other words, find out what your client is looking for when they seek your help. For example, if you are a personal injury attorney, your clients likely are heading online to find out how to sue someone or, even more specifically, what their claim or case may be worth.
Look at Your Competitors
You don’t want to emulate your competitors – being uniquely you helps you to stand out. However, you do want to know what they are doing to target your customers and rank in the search engines. Look at:
- Keywords being used
- Topics discussed
- Marketing language
- Benefits of working with them
Your goal is to find a way to target what the competitors are not. That could include content they are not sharing or keywords they are not trying to rank for in their SEO strategy.
To find your competitors, Google the type of lawyer you are and your city, such as “car accident lawyer in Detroit” – those on the first page of your site are your competitors.
Optimize Your Profiles and Content
Social media can help you to build your search engine rankings, allowing you to reach more people through organic traffic, such as those Google searches for your services. Social media marketing helps to:
- Build backlinks to your website and blog
- Increases website traffic, which the search engines see as valuable
- Creates social signals, such as likes, comments, and shares, to show the search engines the value of your content
- Builds brand awareness, which directly impacts your ranking in the search engines
To achieve these goals, incorporate your keywords into your content. Be sure to provide actually valuable information, not just AI-generated information. Instead, utilize the questions your clients ask and the topics important to your practice right now to create thoughtful posts. These are more likely to gain traction than any type of marketing that you may be paying for on your site.
Creating Engaging Content for Your Social Media Strategy
Your law firm’s social media strategy needs to include valuable information and insights that help potential clients learn about your firm and how you can help them. The content you create should be on brand, a clear representation of you and your services. Here are some types of content law firms can create for social media to make a memorable impact and reach their target audience.
Answer Questions
Why do people call your office? What are their most common questions about their legal needs?
Create short videos and blog posts for your website that answer those questions. Then, share that information on your social media channels. Your objective here should be to provide to-the-point information, based on what people want to know.
Showcase a Testimonial
What can your current clients offer new clients?
While you cannot simply force your clients to share their personal stories, they may be willing to write a review for your Google Reviews or share a testimonial video about what you did for them. Focus on their story to the level they are comfortable with, but share how you worked with them.
Talk About the Community
What is important within your city and community right now that relates to your law firm?
If you are a car accident lawyer, and there is an area where accidents happen frequently in your community, get some statistics together, showcase what happens after an accident, and who can be held accountable, and then talk about fault. Starting these conversations can help you build a strong reputation within your community.
Use Infographics
What’s a complex topic related to your legal practice that your clients need to understand?
Take that topic and use a tool like Canva to create an infographic. This allows you to break down a complex topic in a visual way. You can then use that graphic on your social media accounts and encourage others to share it. For example, if your practice is a medical malpractice firm, create an infographic that outlines the signs that your injuries are due to medical malpractice.
Run a Poll
Opinions are something everyone has – what opinions do your readers have about a legal topic close to your firm?
You may want to poll your audience about the services you offer or if they would like to see your services expand in new ways. For example, create a poll on your page to determine if your clients like a specific type of communication, such as virtual visits.
Showcase Your Team
Can your other attorneys and practice members help you to build your following?
Create profiles of each of your attorneys and legal professionals. Create a short post for your social media pages that outlines each person. This builds credibility and can also help you to get more authentic content that’s valuable to the reader and the search engines.
Simplify Social Media with Surefire Local
As an attorney, you know your services are valuable and critical, but to reach people today, you need to put time into social media marketing. These tools provide a starting point for you to get started. With consistency and a constant focus on providing brand-specific content, you’ll grow your following.
Surefire Local gives you a way to amplify your reach, build your reputation, and save time while doing so. To get started now, sign up for a free demo to see how the Surefire Local tools work to help you reach your audience.