If your firm is still resisting Instagram, I have a message for you: 2010 called and they want their social media strategy back. Instagram has
The almost 1.5 billion people using these two services would probably disagree.
experienced explosive growth since 2010, so why hasn’t your firm’s social media marketing evolved? If you doubt Instagram’s usefulness, know that 700 million users consider this platform intrinsic to their social media interactions.
If you aren’t familiar with Instagram, know it’s a fantastic platform for building a personal brand using visual storytelling techniques.
And isn’t marketing professional services all about stories? For law firms, facts of a case are nothing if not a story of who, what and where. When clients recount the details of their situation, they are telling you a story. Instagram facilitates the same end-result but in an online forum. In other words, Instagram empowers professionals to tell the story of their expertise or to visually demonstrate why they are the right practitioner for a certain type of work.
Instant tips for Instagram
Just like with anything, the successful use of Instagram in a marketing plan is dependent on knowing and capitalizing on its unique quirks.
To improve your Instagram experience, it’s wise to know:
• Hashtags (#) are the king of Instagram. They are a key searching tool and a great way to find others and be found by people searching for lawyers like you
• Professional Instagram posts should reflect positively on the lawyer and their law practice. Posts should reflect your law firm’s culture and philosophy, avoid political and religious themes.
• Instagram takes commitment. Posts should be made at least once a day so visitors have a reason to keep coming back to your account
Instagram stats
Statistics are a great way of measuring the usefulness of whatever we are researching, and Instagram’s numbers are impressive.
For example, according to Hootsuite, 75 percent of Instagram users take action, such as visiting a web site, after reading an ad posted on the platform. If the focus of your law practice is one that might appeal to clients in countries outside the United States, promoting your work on Instagram is an excellent idea. That’s because 80 percent of Instagram users come from outside the U.S.
Moreover, it is estimated that over 70 percent of American companies utilize Instagram in their marketing, rendering it more popular than Twitter. Just like we said in our post regarding Pinterest: go where your competitors aren’t. Instagram’s rapid success merits taking a hard look.
Note to law firms: familiarize yourself with rules governing lawyer advertising. For example, Facebook, who owns Instagram, recently issued an app allowing users to inform readers when a post is for promotional purposes or involves a trademarked product. For thought leadership, there is no need to mark the content as promotional, but for everything else, its wise to mark the content as attorney advertising.
This article was written by Adrian Dayton and Tami Kamin Meyer (who is a personal bankruptcy lawyer and a frequent author on Progressive Law Practice). You can follow Tami on Twitter @girlwithapen and you can follow Adrian @adriandayton. For more ideas on how to bring in more business with social media, check out Adrian’s social media blog https://adriandayton.com