Legal Internet Marketing Blog
By now, most Web-savvy people in the legal world, or any industry for that matter, are familiar with the importance of social marketing. They understand that social marketing not only enhances the effectiveness of other legal Internet marketing strategies but far more importantly, it allows them to receive feedback from and interact with their site’s visitors and target audience. Social marketing provides a practical way to share information. However, the owners of sites and their Internet marketing consultant need to be very careful about how this information is dispensed. Web users are becoming increasingly sophisticated at discerning useful social marketing content provided for their benefit or entertainment from attempts to manipulate their purchasing decisions via social marketing methods. In order achieve its goals, social marketing strategies must have merit and something useful to contribute to the social networking communities that is serves.
To that end, here are some social networking ideas to keep in mind that will help you through the current economy and set you up for success when it recovers:
- Keep it real! – As previously mentioned, Web users are quite astute at discerning genuine efforts to contribute to the community from fake attempts to manipulate them and can employ the power of social networking to ‘call out’ fakes. This is illustrated by a recent incident where some popular Twitterers were outed for taking cash in exchange for product recommendations in their tweets. This created an outrage among Twitter users, and the backlash sullied the reputations of the Twitterers and the products they were shilling for.
- Create your own community and engage your readers – Blog posts rank well in search results, give readers a reason to check your site often, provide interesting and useful information and create a sense of community among your readers. Consider adding a blog to your site with posts written by you, your legal Internet marketing consultant or a mix or both.
- Add content regularly – but make sure that it is useful! Adding content for content’s sake to your blog will turn off your readers. Make sure that each post is well thought out and addresses things that your readers want to know. Adding regular content to your blog also helps ranking opportunities as search engines will index a site more frequently if it adds new content regularly.
- Invite discussion and interaction – Encourage the readers of your legal blog, forum or other social networking tools to add their input, ask questions and contribute to the discussion. Most people like to share their opinions, so facilitate this by adding social bookmarking tools so that they can easily share the content, responding to their questions in a timely manner and participating in the discussion. Foster a sense of community among your readers and give them reasons to check your site often.
These are just a few of the many ways that legal professionals and the owners of other Web sites can harness the power of social marketing to increase site traffic, attract your target audience and prosper in lean economic conditions. For more information and more detailed explanations of why these social marketing strategies are so effective, contact a legal Internet marketing specialist at SLS Consulting.