There are many different forms of marketing that immigration lawyers can take advantage of, but there’s also a lot of noise due to the plethora of options available, even when it comes to social media marketing.
If you operate an immigration law firm, then these social media marketing tips should help you develop a solid plan to help you build a following, attract more leads and sign more clients.
1. Do Livestream for Q&As
Live video streams are growing in popularity on social media platforms and are an excellent way to build a loyal following and generate immigration clients and leads.
Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube all have features to enable live streams where viewers can post questions in real-time so that you don’t have to prepare content in advance. Between questions and at the end of your live Q&A session, you can promote call to actions to lead magnets as well as your business.
2. Promote Webinars and Events for Immigration Topics
Webinars are another video-based marketing tool that can generate leads and appointments for your immigration law firm.
Hosting a webinar where people seeking information on immigration can get a lot of answers and valuable guidance for free is a sure-fire way to attract new clients. Viewers that connect with you and find you to be an authoritative legal source are more likely to convert during or shortly after the session. Those who don’t, but eventually want to immigrate are likely to follow you on social media as well as consume more of your content, whether on social or your website’s immigration content.
Instead of having the floor open to all questions asked by viewers, webinars are prepared in advance with a specific topic.
Presenting on a certain immigration topic, such as family sponsorship, allows you to narrow your audience for that presentation, if that’s an area of business that you want to develop further. This also allows you to refine your call-to-actions and pitch throughout the presentation, making a very specific and compelling offer to those tuning in.
3. Share Articles from Your Website or Blog
There’s a large overlap between social media marketing and content marketing for immigration attorneys. After publishing articles and blog posts on your website, make sure to get the most out of your content by posting and sharing it on your social media networks.
Immigration information is highly valuable to the right audiences and social media makes for the perfect place for that content to be distributed, limited without borders.
The network effects of posting articles are very valuable, especially for immigration law firms. Having your content and posts shared by others can grow your following in a very organic way and attract new traffic to your website too. This can likely lead to new clients from people who found your content through your own followers sharing and promoting your social posts.
4. Create a Group for People interested in Immigration
One of the best ways to cultivate an engaged following over time is to create a Facebook or LinkedIn Group for prospective immigrants to post questions and share tips and information with each other. The key benefit to groups is that it builds a separate community within a social media network, where people actively check it, contribute to it and receive notifications for it.
Unlike your business page where people won’t visit nearly as often and your firm is the only one that gets to post on the firm feed or timeline, groups are multi-directional. This allows anyone within the group to post, making it much more of an open dialogue than seeming like a page controlled by a business entity.
When you create the group, you also get the ability to keep it open or closed and can admin who is allowed to join and post in the group. This offers you control over the content posted in the group. As an admin, you’ll automatically be viewed as an authority everytime you post. This makes it easy to develop trust and pitch your offers and content.
Make sure when you run a social media group that you don’t abuse it by simply posting your own articles and content and promoting your business. This is an easy way to lose followers, trust and traction with your group. Allow others to post and answer questions, provide free value more often than you try to promote your firm.
The more natural the group feels, the better. The more it feels like a shameless plug for a business, the less people will interact with it.
5. Share Legal updates and changes
The law is dynamic and always changing. The field of immigration law is no exception and can be hard to keep up with and track of. Keep your circles informed with changes in the law and news around immigration to build your trust and authority with your social connections.
This type of content is very shareable, too, which is perfect for growing your followers and organic reach on your primary social networks. These posts can either be written as standard posts, blogs or articles from your website that you link and share or even a third-party news source.
6. Convert Social Followers to Email Subscribers
At the end of the day, algorithms are the proprietary technology standing between your social media posts and your following. Algorithms gave you the traffic and they could take it away. This is a very real threat, especially when you’ve invested a lot of energy and resources into building a social media presence to help generate more leads, clients and referral sources.
The best way to protect yourself is to turn your earned social traffic into owned traffic. You can achieve this by getting people onto your email list.
Some people who are deeply interested or invested in a topic, such as immigration, will naturally subscribe to your email list to stay up to date with what you have to offer in the way of free information. These people already trust you enough as an immigration lawyer and source.
The majority of people, however, won’t. The best way to get them onto your list is to make them an attractive offer through the form of a lead magnet, such as a free ebook guide or invitation-only webinar. These are compelling offers that many more people are willing to exchange their email for if they believe the contents of the lead magnet are sufficiently valuable.
7. Reach more People with your Personal Profile
Getting an edge over other immigration attorneys leveraging social media is important. One of the best and easiest ones to take advantage of is using your own personal profile just as often or more than your business profile.
There are two primary reasons for this:
- Social media platforms are about people, not businesses: People want to interact and engage with other people on social media. They’re more likely to comment, like and share your posts if it comes from your personal profile than from your business page.
- Social networks limit the organic reach for businesses: Social media companies are businesses and their primary monetization strategy is charging advertisers for screen time in front of their users. While you may be posting on your business profile rather than running advertisements, the social networks don’t treat it this way.
After all, if you’re posting content on your business page, it must be for promotional and commercial purposes, right? Their algorithms automatically limit the ability of your business posts to reach your network unless you make it promotional or sponsored content by spending some ad dollars on it.
