How Amanda Shaffer is transcending typical attorney-client relationships by showcasing client gifts in her law firm’s marketing.
In this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda talks about how providing exceptional service often warrants “rewards” or “signs of appreciation” after a case is closed.
Being an immigration attorney, Amanda encounters clients from all over the world and from different walks of life. This is great because it offers an opportunity for her professional reach to positively influence her social media presence.
Showcasing your client’s appreciation towards your firm by posting photos and reviews on social media is a great way of free publicity and a great way to start a conversation while getting more likes.
This gives you a chance to be more creative with your social media outlets. Often we become so stuck on a structure that our pages look a bit drab, but by using software like Canva to post colorful and appreciative content surrounding YOUR ACTUAL CLIENTS, you can break the mold and the algorithm.
Take a look at this week’s episode and comment below on how your clients have shown appreciation to you for a job well done!
Video Transcript
Amanda Shaffer: Hi, welcome to #FollowAttorneyAmanda, where you follow me on my quest to more likes and social media, and essentially more business. This morning, I received an awesome gift from a client in Indonesia. She sent Aaron and I – I got a scarf; he got this little cool bike, made in Indonesian and some Indonesian coffee. This was the first time she had gone home in years after we got her a green card, which is really cool. I love getting gifts from all over the world and whenever we do, I always want to put a post about it because it’s really good PR; it shows your clients appreciate you. You’re doing obviously doing something right if people are giving you gifts and that you appreciate your clients for thanking them for it. So all around good stuff. There’s a part of me that just wants to post a picture and say, “Hey, thanks for the gift.” But there’s another part of me that wants to give a little bit more effort so that it can possibly get seen by more people.
So, I always run into this conundrum. How much time do I spend making these stupid graphics? I use canva.com, which is an amazing platform that can do everything. It’s like a hundred and something dollars a year, and it has every template you can imagine for every size that you can imagine. You can even get things printed and I’ve used it pretty much for all – once I learned about it last year, all my social media posts going for all my graphics, even videos and whatnot. The difficult thing about Canva is there so many options. If you just type in, like – if you want to put like an element, which is basically like an icon or – I forgot what they’re called – or vector – something of illustration basically.
So you type in like America or legal and I don’t even know if there’s an end to how many different ones there are, which is really helpful when you’re trying to pick something, but at the same time, it’s really overwhelming and can make this process that should take like – I don’t know, 20 minutes, take forever because first, you got to – taking the picture is the easy part and thinking of what to say. Then I got to post it wherever I’m going to post it and that all takes time. I could post it on the website. I’m not even bothering right now, which I’ll talk about another time, but basically the phone doesn’t stop ringing. I’m technically off the clock now. It’s almost five o’clock. So the – what’s it called? I always get distracted when the phone – when phone rings, I forget what I’m saying.
So yes, so it takes time to post on the different platforms and if you’re really going to do it, you got to size the graphics differently. That is annoying, especially if you want to share it with groups, which I find is the best way to get people to look at it, but what’s even more overwhelming for me is, because I know nothing about design is actually designing the thing. And so like the way I normally go about it is like I had two pictures I wanted to put in a template. I’m just going to look for a template. It has two pictures that’s bright and cheery and it is like a congratulation, thank you type of thing. So in the template search I searched for thank you. I don’t know if I had to search for thank you. I had to stop myself at a certain point. Once I found – I find ones, I saved the ones I find that look good, but you can just keep going forever. Fact is, I don’t have the time to go forever. So I am always this constant – I have another client calling right now and I will get back to all of them. But when people call me at 4:52 on a Monday, that is what it is. This is again if I haven’t said this before, we desperately need a phone service. Anyways, so I’m always facing this issue of, how much time do I spend looking for the right template, the right picture? Because I kind of get lost in it a lot and I have nobody to turn to say, “Hey, is this good?” I don’t know the colors, the fonts – a million fonts to choose from. I don’t want to go to a platform that has less options because it might not have what I need, but at the same time, I wish I had a better way of filtering the options or I wish it operated more like a person where I could be like, “Hey, here’s what I need. Can you get me this?”
So, ultimately it ended up taking me about – I got distracted a few times – probably about 45 minutes overall to do all of it for this post. As I said, if it wasn’t an important post, I wasn’t planning on doing it this morning. I have lots of other work to do. Clearly, people are calling, which is always hard to continue with the social media stuff when clients are calling, which is a good thing, but I wanted – this is one that you just like any type of client reviews that you want to post, this is one you want to get out there and want to be on the page so that people can see it. And it’s definitely gotten a decent number of likes. So I’m fairly happy about that, at least, it doesn’t seem like a total loss. Obviously, the next question is, is it making me money? That’s a much harder question to ask, but I have to always remember that it’s a group effort or a collaborative effort between all the different things that I do to get business. So I like to think that posts like these, I think they show our human side as well as our compassionate side and how our clients feel, I think even more so than a review because anyone can – any client can write a review. Some reviews are obviously better than others, but this client went across the world, thought of us, got us a gift, and sent it.
So it actually does not happen that often, maybe every few months or maybe twice a year or something, I don’t know. But whenever we do get it, it’s really cool and I like to showcase it. I once got an African dress and I’ve gotten two African dresses now. I’ve gotten a sarong from Indonesia. It’s really pretty. Can’t even think of anything. We get a lot of people to bring his food a lot too. I don’t take pictures of the food unless it’s like something spectacular because that’s food, but the gifts I try to do. So yes, that’s about it. Today, like I said, just focusing on it’s good -it’s an easier, easy-ish post to do. And it definitely is a post that I expect to get a high number of engagements for, whether that translates into business or not, I don’t know. But I do know at the very least when people look at our page and see it, it’ll be in the back of their head, so that’s of course, a positive thing. So that’s all today for my entry on #FollowAttorneyAmanda. I’ll see you next time.
