Tired of her law firm’s boring content, Amanda decided to give hosting a gameshow a try.
No one said legal content on social media has to be boring! Finding new and innovative ways to draw attention to your practice will not only bring in a strong online following but could also cause you to receive referrals, revenue, and professional connections.
On this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda talks about her innovative online game show called “Are You smarter Than A Nationalized Citizen!” #AYSTANC Amanda dawns her hosting hat every other Wednesday at 9 pm. The show is streamed live on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. The show’s premise is to get two nationalized citizens to go head to head answering the civics questions that are on the Country’s Nationalization Test.
Follow this video and see how Amanda effectively pairs legal knowledge, fun/engaging content while promoting her firm all at the same time!
Video Transcript
Amanda Shaffer: Welcome to #FollowAttorneyAmanda, where are you follow me on my journey to more likes on social media and essentially more business. Today, I want to talk about my game show. I have a game show that I do live on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube called “Are You Smarter Than a Naturalized Citizen?” Basically, all it is, is I have two, at this point, it’s just immigration attorneys. They go head to head to see who can get 10 of the naturalization test questions first correct. If you’re unaware, in order to become a US citizen through naturalization, you have to pass a civics test and at the civics test, you get 10 attempts, and if you get six of those 10 questions, right. We go to 10 on the game show. It was something I thought of a few months ago. I thought it would be an interesting way to put myself out there and put other people out there and do some collaborations with people on social media, which gets you a much larger audience, of course, because you get their audience too. The thing that triggered it was like, if you remember Jay Leno, when he would go out in the streets and show a picture of George Bush and ask people who is this, and they didn’t know. I’ve been at naturalization interviews before where I’m like, “I don’t think most Americans can get this question correct. So it was more like piquing your curiosity to see how people did. I actually started when they had the harder naturalization test, but that’s not that exciting. They went back to the easier one.
Anyways, so I started this – we’re up to episode seven now, and it actually was a lot of work especially to get going. I made a PowerPoint presentation. That’s like the game show. It’s pretty – it has all the effects. It has sound effects, it has music. I have to customize it each show to fit the – like I put different biographics for the people, pictures in them, depending on where you live, some of the questions pertain to your residents. So it is a little bit of upkeep in between. I do it every two weeks. I’ve gotten – I’ve definitely got very positive feedback from it. Everyone that hears about is really excited about it. Whether or not it turns into actual money in my pocket is another question. That’s the thing that I kind of struggle with is figuring out is like, “Is this going to make me money or is it making me money?” I try to do things that I enjoy at least, like the game show’s fun. So at the very least, I get to meet some new people. It’s fun and people seem to enjoy it. Whether it makes money would be an added benefit, of course. And I need to figure out how to track that.
But last week or two weeks ago, our last episode, we had a lot of viewers and I was really hoping that maybe it was starting to pick up some pace. I did find out one of my contestants had over 6,000 followers on Facebook for her law firm. So that may have been one of the reasons our numbers were up. We’ll find out this week because the two girls I have on this week – tomorrow – they both don’t really use Facebook that much to get business. One of them is big on Instagram, s we’ll see if her audience shows up on Instagram, and the other one, she doesn’t really do much on social media, or at least on Facebook, she doesn’t do too much. So I’d be interested to see, but again, like all of these results that I’m getting are purely anecdotal since I don’t have any – I can find statistics, but I don’t – I can’t interpret them at this point. I don’t know what they mean. I spend about $30 per show advertising it and then $30 after putting it out there. I don’t know if I should be bothering spending $60 every two weeks on this. It’s not that much money, but I could put that towards something else. My ad budget is low to begin with. Like when – I don’t have an exact budget because I should. I never made an exact budget, but like when I post something on Facebook, like today I posted #Tuesdaytips, I’ll boost that for seven days for 30 bucks.
So I can always put the 30 bucks towards something else. I’m trying to figure out how to gauge that. But like I said, at the very least I’m doing something enjoyable and I’ve met a lot of attorneys and I’ve actually gotten some referrals from some of these attorneys I’ve met doing the show. Now I advertise in like all the attorneys’ groups, like does anyone want to be a contestant? So I’m advertising the show and advertising spots for people at the same time, hoping I get more viewers as well. I have some bigger plans for the show if it gets popular. I don’t think I’m going to be sticking with immigration attorneys exclusively or attorneys for that matter. I think it would be a lot of fun to do like, high school teachers or like – versus somebody — It’s harder to find someone who’s studying for the test, maybe to go against their attorney or someone else. So I have all sorts of ideas about it. I’ve not like – finding attorneys are easy. I just go into my attorney groups, ask who wants to play. I don’t really know any teachers, so I have to explore that more, but it would definitely open up to a wider audience and I think the other purpose of this is to be educational. So it will help teach people about our country and what’s on naturalization testing specifically.
So I would definitely like to expand it out more. I’m trying really hard to stick to this every two-week schedule. When I was doing my Q and A discussion, we were doing it every three weeks because there was so much that I tried to put into the promotion of it beforehand, so two weeks was not enough time. We haven’t done a Q&A discussion now in like a month. We’ve gotten kind of irregular because of how busy we’ve been, which is a good thing, but I would – it’s better to keep up your regular lives at regular times so people know to tune in. I don’t know if that’s – this is going to be our seventh now that I’ve been consistent with every two weeks, Wednesday at 9:00 PM. I was hoping maybe that’s why we had the bigger audience last week. We’ll see; we’ll see what happens tomorrow night. But like I said, either way, I think it’s definitely something I’m going to continue doing. I always get worried I’m not going to find contestants, but I usually get at least one or two attorneys reaching out to me when they see my posts about it, and then I’ll reach out to someone if I can’t fill it, I’ll reach out to someone I know and be like, “Hey, you should play the game.” That was one of my contestants tonight or tomorrow, I had reached out to her and I was like, “You should play.”
But yes, it’s a lot of fun and I think that that’s one of the things – I don’t know, like I said, I don’t have any hard data on how this is impacted our practice at this point and our bottom line, but I can tell you that I feel like that this is a solid idea and it’s going to continue to grow and that it will be beneficial overall for us. I’ve been trying to think of other types of videos and games and whatever I can make that accomplishes the same goal. So I have other stuff in the pipeline, which I’ll talk about next time on #FollowAttorneyAmanda. But yes, I think that you can never lose out when you’re doing these things, if at least like you’re enjoying yourself and putting yourself out there to have new people meet you and see you and get to know who you are and that’s what I’ve been doing and it’s that – just the community itself that I’ve opened myself up to has been incredibly beneficial. So that is all today for #FollowAttorneyAmanda. Join me next time on my journey to more likes and more business. And I will see you then.
