The blurred line between too much information and the right type of content can have any business or small law firm stuck when managing social media channels.
Social Media Marketing is a tricky tool to navigate when it comes to providing informative and creative content. Your goal is to intrigue viewers enough that they follow, share, and like your content. However, depending on what type of law you practice your content might fall a bit short and the question comes up, “Do we add relative content about us personally to spruce it up?”
In this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda mules over if she should start sharing more personal information on her law firm’s page.
Video Transcript
Welcome to #FollowAttorneyAmanda. I am Attorney Amanda and today we’re going to talk about personal life or the mix of personal life with social media marketing. This is another thing where it’s definitely changed with respect to how much of yourself and your life you put into the public view. Ever since I started working with my partner, Aaron, which has been what, 2008, so a long time. I can’t do the math right now. Ever since we started working together, he’s always been very clear to me that the best thing to do is keep your personal life out of lawyering. It should never be about the lawyer, it should always be about the client. So you don’t want to have, for example, something online that might come back to discredit you or impeach you or anything like that. I always took it very seriously. I never combined my personal Facebook with my Instagram or anything like I didn’t have Instagram back then, but anything like that.
However, since the rise of social media marketing, I’ve definitely seen a huge shift in that, in that number one, it helps to show people that you’re a real person. The type of things I’m talking about is like talking about your personal life in any respect, whether it’s me mentioning, I went on my honeymoon or that I got married or like a picture of my husband, to me playing – I’ve had a picture of me playing softball once, or scuba diving once, all the way to your About us page on the website. Like I made sure to point out certain things about me, about Aaron, like he has a boat and likes motorcycles, fixing cars.
Where you draw the line though is always difficult because people definitely want to feel like they know you and that you’re a real person, especially if they’re going to find you online. But you also don’t want to give away everything. I mean, it’s your personal life; you want to keep it personally; you want to keep it separate. So I’ve had a hard time figuring out where that line is. I see other people will – there’s actually a lot of lawyers who will have a separate – will have a law firm Instagram, and then like a mom lawyer, or like a lady lawyer, or like some other type of Instagram handle and then they do their personal stuff and they will like it from their other one and go back and forth, which is fine. I think you have to find what is comfortable for you and I’m not really sure for me yet where that is.
There’s part of me that wanted to post a picture of our wedding and say, “congratulations” when I got married in March, but then I was like, I don’t really feel comfortable telling – making it clear. I told people I was going on my honeymoon because I didn’t want to be bothered. I wanted an excuse when I came back if I was a little delayed in doing things. Otherwise, I didn’t see a reason to tell clients or potential clients. I like to when I do my game show, I like to, in my biography, tell them like a fun fact about me. I always have my guests tell fun facts and share pictures of them or their family or their dogs or cats or whatever. And I think it’s a good way to help put yourself out there and show people you’re a real person. Obviously, people don’t just hire you because they think you’re a real person or have something in common, but you’d be surprised why people call us. We’ve had one guy call Aaron because they saw that he liked motorcycles and it actually had something to do with a motorcycle.
So you never know what it’s going to be. But the question remains, how much do you reveal? We’re still figuring that out, but it’s definitely something you need to take into consideration because you have to have – I do believe the way it’s – the trend has been going, you have to have some level of your personal life in your social media marketing. Where that level is, again, that’s the question. So I’m going to be exploring this more and trying to figure it out. I always conclude like my dogs in my game show. They announced the winner and when I did foreign dog Friday, I also include dogs, but I do have to explore this further and I’ll probably talk about this some more in a future episode, but that is all today for #FollowAttorneyAmanda. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.
