Do you want to have a personal Facebook profile to interact and connect with people? Absolutely! Do you want your law firm to have a fan page on Facebook? Yes. But don’t expect it to have a ton of people on it.
Facebook isn’t just big – it’s huge. More than 500 million active users, 50% of which log on each day. In fact, people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Each month, that number grows by leaps and bounds.
Full disclosure – my law firm has a fan page. I set it up when the firm was formed in January, and have actively ignored it since that time. Read on, and I’ll tell you why.
Your law firm provides solutions for people with legal problems. Not many people like to broadcast to the world that they have legal problems, and have sought the help of a lawyer to get them back where they want to be.
When you get someone to join your firm’s fan page, that information is automatically dropped into their profile. It’s visible for everyone to see. And for many people, being publicly outed as a client of your law firm may not be too appealing.
Consider the divorce client who hires you. Do you think they want their ex-spouse, friends and colleagues to know even more about their marital woes?
How about the bankruptcy client? Sure, your prior bankruptcy clients may be an excellent source of referrals … but do they want their high school buddies knowing about their financial problems?
Criminal clients – well, you know where I’m going. It’s like giving your clients a t-shirt that says, “I got busted with a bag of pot in my glove compartment – ask me about it!”
With that in mind, you can easily see why the prospect of getting your clients to “like” your law firm Facebook fan page isn’t going to be the easiest thing in the world.
So why would a law firm want a Facebook fan page if it’s going to languish in obscurity?
Facebook is, as I said at the top of this article, a highly-trafficked site. Lots of people are there, and there often. Your law firm Facebook fan page provides a lot of information about the work you do and the solutions you provide, and it’s all publicly-available and searchable in the Facebook ecosystem. Having that content online is never a bad thing, and customizing the fan page is relatively simple to do.
Even for those who casually stop by without clicking the “Like” button, you can (and should) have the following information available:
- your law firm website and/or blog URL (much like you’d have in your email signature);
- office address and directions to the firm;
- office hours of operation;
- links to your blog posts and other pieces of content, which you can have automatically inserted using a wide variety of tools (I used Twitterfeed);
- a landing page with an opt-in form for your tractor beam and/or newsletter.
Sure, you can go crazy and trick it out, but why? People are likely going to use the fan page as a jumping-off point for their future contact with your law firm, a way to get to know you without leaving the Facebook ecosystem.
So, how’s your Facebook fan page working out for you?
Jay I created a Facebook page for my law office and didn't expect it to get much attention. To my surprise more than forty, of the two hundred or so friends I have on Facebook, marked themselves as "fans." Now what do I do? I've read with interest your suggestions above in this article. ~D.G.
Donnie, are these your clients or prospective clients? Or are they friends and colleagues who've marked that they "like" the page because you've asked them to do so? There's a big difference there.
I have the same experience as Donnie, but I generally agree with you Jay. There's a few people who like the informative nature of the blog articles, but mostly camaraderie from friends and colleagues.
I recommend trying http://www.socialkik.com to buy Facebook fans, they have been recommended by a lot of bloggers and they can both be trusted. Socialkik can actually add fans to your Facebook page without logging into your Facebook profile, so I guess they send out thousands of suggestions to people in their network until they get 1K, 2K, 5K, 10K or 100K of Facebook fans to join your page, which is totally fine with Facebook terms of use.