The hardest thing about developing a great content marketing program isn’t even writing the content — it’s about publishing the content. It’s not super difficult to add a new blog post to your website, sure . . . But what about adding your content to various social media channels? Writing something, especially recording something, is easy — the challenge is then going ahead and posting it your YouTube channels (personal and professional), your Facebook pages (personal and professional), your Twitter accounts (personal and professional), your LinkedIn accounts (personal and professional) . . . Heck, maybe you’ve even got an Instagram account — or, maybe you call it ‘Insta’, like I think the cool kids do. In any event, it’s a lot to navigate, and a lot of time to spend, especially when the payoff is not immediate, but builds up only over time.
Saving yourself from social media hell, while still effectively managing your law practice is not easy. But, like many things in life, it comes down to one thing: organization.
There are at least a few things you can do to make sure that your marketing game is strong on social media and that won’t break the bank, or your soul. (The assumption here is that you’re already competent in creating the content.)
Firstly, choose and use a social media marketing management platform. You want to use one software through which you can access and post to all your accounts on a schedule. Free or near-free systems like Hootsuite, Buffer, RavenTools and Tweetdeck will allow you to publish and schedule social media posts across different platforms automatically — even when (actually, especially when) you’re not around to do it. This means that you can post to social media without falling down some ill-defined social media rabbit hole that you spend two hours with. And, most of these systems track links and can provide basic post analytics.
Secondly, decide upon a publication schedule. We all know that the more you can publish, the more traction you’ll get online. But, It helps to maintain a regular schedule for doing so. That not only means that you will be more likely to post on a recurring basis, but it also means that you can do it in the same time frame, all the time. If you started posting your new blog or podcast at 2 pm every Thursday afternoon, people will begin to expect that, and to look forward to it. Just don’t stop doing it . . .
Finally, choose a time for when you schedule all your social media posting. I’m a Sunday night guy myself. That means you can schedule your entire slate of social media posts for the whole week while watching Game or Thrones. Then, your only obligation, if you choose to accept it, is to check in here and there throughout the week, in order to engage with your followers.
There’s nothing quite like talking to someone, and having them ask: ‘Wait, did you just tweet something? How??’