Is going live on social media for law firm marketing worth all the effort? Small firm attorney, Amanda Shaffer, talks about whether it’s been beneficial or a waste of time.
The Live Video feature on social media apps has changed user-audience interaction drastically. This feature allows users to interact directly with their target audience almost effortlessly.
Live videos are typically used by content creators and social media influencers but who’s to say attorneys can’t reap the benefits of this amazing feature.
What Are Live Videos: Live videos are special features on social media apps like, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so much more. This feature allows you to connect with your social network via a computer camera or mobile device to broadcast real-time video through the site/app. Live broadcasters can decide who can see their video and use this content to engage their audience during the moments and events that are important to them.
In this week’s episode of #FollowAttornyAmanda, Amanda talks about how she started utilizing this social media feature to her advantage, during the Covid lockdowns.
By jumping right into the unknown for her market, Amanda soon realized that one sure-fire way to get more traffic onto her page is by doing live videos and by doing them often.
Take a look at this week’s episode and comment below with some of your tips on doing Live videos!
Video Transcript
Amanda Shaffer: Welcome to Follow Attorney Amanda, while you join me on my quest for more likes on social media and ultimately more business. Today, we’re going to talk about lives. If you don’t know what lives are, there are live videos you take and they stream directly on whatever platform pretty much you want. So I generally do it on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. I’d like to do it on LinkedIn, but it doesn’t link properly right now with Streamyard.com, which is the streaming service that I’ve used, which is okay, but I haven’t found one that’s been better. I do share resources with a lot of other immigration attorneys across the country. We talk about what we use and a lot of us use the same stuff and no one’s complained about some of these issues, but no one has unfortunately found a better solution so far. Anyways, so last I was talking about some of my efforts to increase business. I mentioned that last year, around this time when the pandemic hit and we were all forced to stay at home in New York City, that is when I changed. I pivoted and started to shift my focus towards, “What can I do on social media in order to bring in business?”
What I learned was that I should do Facebook Lives. So up until that point, I had done videos online, mostly through YouTube, I think I put them on Facebook too and on the website. Some of them – I have a couple of videos with over 10,000 views and then I have videos that I posted three years ago with like 20 views. Haven’t figured out yet why some get more than others, even when I think it’s the topic. I try to do the topic again in a slightly different way, I don’t get the same thing, so I don’t know. Anyways, so yes, I had relative success with the videos, but definitely nothing – very, very little. Doing the pre-taped videos were actually a lot of work, because number one, I was not writing a full script, but I was writing points out and you could see I was reading, which is actually one of the criticisms I got that I needed to be a little bit more natural. They definitely take planning. I also was trying to fit the entire video in about ideally less than five minutes, but a hundred percent, less than 10 minutes. I had to pick narrow topics and that’s another reason why I would want to write it out first because I can just talk and go off-topic. I didn’t want people to not watch the videos if they were too long.
But what’s interesting about the live videos is when you read how long should these videos be, they tell you that they should be like at least five minutes; they should be longer, if possible, like 10 minutes or longer. The reason is because- especially if you advertise in advance, it gives people a chance to join. The live videos, anyone who likes you or follows you on Facebook, or Instagram, or subscribes to you on YouTube, when you go live, they get notified and they might not be able to join you right away. You could actually see when people are joining you. You don’t have to rush basically. I definitely don’t see any more or less success going longer. I’ve done ones that were less than five minutes and I’ve done ones that were over an hour, depending on the topic. I would never do one over an hour if people weren’t still watching, of course.
Anyways, so that was one thing that was intriguing to me to think like, “Hey, I’m not going to have to do as much planning in advance when I do these live videos.” I learned about it because I had a client who is a social influencer, whatever you call it, an Instagram influencer. She has 80,000 followers and she hired us around that time for a legal matter. When I saw that she had all these followers and then I saw she did a lot of lives on Instagram and I was like, “Hmm”. I’d seen lives before, but I was never that interested, because even though all of my videos were done in one take, because I don’t know how to video edit, but they were shorter. But with the lives, just like this video that I’m doing right now is live and not going to be edited, anything goes. So it was a little nerve-racking at first, to think that I was going to do this. I figured, “Hey, if it brings in business.” Everyone was saying, “More people are likely to see these videos, the live ones than they are the pre-taped ones.”
People really liked the live video. The first live video I did was about domestic violence options or legal options for domestic violence victims and in New York, if you want to get an order protection, technically there are three paths: criminal court, civil court, or family court. I went through all those options. I advertised it like crazy in advance, tried to get people to ask questions in advance. I said, “Send me them anonymously if you don’t want us to type it in the public chat while we’re doing the actual live.” I did get some questions, which was nice, but I definitely spent – out of everything that I’ve done since then, that is the most advertising I’ve definitely done for something. I had a decent show up that day, and the live, it’s not just about the live it’s about what you do with it after. You can repurpose the video, which I have so many videos I want to repurpose, like clips that I could put in about a specific thing. I just don’t have the time to do it, unfortunately. You can boost it after, boost it before too if you make an event. Most of my views and I think most of everyone’s views actually come out of replays.
I really think that my focus on domestic violence at the time was on point. At that time, lockdown was really hitting in New York City, as well as I think in Seattle and domestic violence incidences were skyrocketing across the state across the city and people, and I know a lot of people just don’t know where to turn for help. I got a couple, I think I got a couple from – I know I got a lot of calls from it. I know – I’m pretty sure I got about three or two cases from like right around that same time, so it’s not a hundred percent always where somebody – why someone hires you or what does it, but I don’t think it was any coincidence that I – thank you – that I got those clients right after I did that.
Ever since then, I’ve tried to do them regularly. Ideally, I would do them like at least once a week, the same time, so people knew when to tune in. I’ve talked about that with Aaron many times and he’s on board with it, but of course, I have to arrange it all and it’s not that easy because there are attorneys that just do question and answer sessions, like no topic. I’ve seen it, a lot of my colleagues do it, but I know even when we pick a topic, people are asking us about all different things. It’s more like a radio show, which is fine, but I’m also just trying to – I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m still contemplating doing the Q and A, because that’s easy to say, “Hey, every week, Wednesday at noon, ask me your immigration questions or whatever.”
I like having the topics, whenever – we do Q and A sessions live and we advertise those in events too, but we always have like an outline. If people are asking questions, we know what to talk about and it’s not just silence. We’ve had lives – the Q and A lives – where people ask us a million questions and we barely get to the outline. We’ve also had the opposite where I have just talked. There was one that I remember that I just talked, so you just have to go with the flow. You can’t be scared with the lives, because like I’ve burped – I’ve done awkward things, I’ve said awkward things, I’ve definitely had word vomit at times and I’ve had my dogs interrupt, but it’s about the authenticity.
It’s about the realness of it that seems to be – I guess, the most attractive part of it. So I continue to do them and I continue to have pretty much pretty good success for them. I added the Instagram lives more recently, because I don’t have as many Instagram followers, but the Stream yard – I’m only paying to stream to three places at once. I actually take the phone and I – oh no, actually for that one, I do it this way. Basically, where the phone is right now, I put it so I can stream it on Instagram on the phone, stream the rest on Facebook.
Yes, I will talk more about the different types of lives that I do, but that is what got me started in the right direction with keeping our businesses afloat during the pandemic. We’ll see you next time.
