Blogging Tips for Lawyers – Marketing Industry Report Shows Importance of Blogging

The social media marketing debate has shifted from, “Should I be doing it?” to “How should I be doing it?” Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs are necessary to build your law firm’s brand and attract new clients. Your time and resources are limited. This leads to the question of which social media activities provide the best return on investment. According to the recently-released 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, your firm should be focused on creating original written content. Below you will find blogging tips for lawyers that are beneficial to helping you get started on your legal blog.

Statistics Reveal the Importance of the Written Word and Blogging

One of the best blogging tips for lawyers is to create original content. The 6th annual report, published by Social Media Examiner, surveyed over 2,800 marketers, the majority of whom focus primarily on attracting consumers (versus businesses). Among them, 94% said that they use original written content in their social media marketing. Curation of other people’s content (73%), is also pervasive among marketers. Marketers use to a lesser degree of original visual assets (60%), original videos (60%) and original audio (22%).

Further highlighting the importance of original written content is the fact that 58% of marketers selected it as the single most important form of content for their business. This percentage is more than 3-times higher than the next most important (“original visual assets”, named most important by 19% of respondents). Original visual assets include things like infographics and memes.

Finally, when marketers were asked how they will change their use of content in the near future, 81% said that they plan to increase their use of original written content. Only 1% of marketers said they have no plan to utilize original written content.

Using Blogs to Your Advantage

The American Bar Association’s 2013 Legal Technology Survey found that 10% of lawyers have blogs and 27% of law firms have blogs. There is a major difference, however, between having a blog and regularly updating a blog. Authentically engaging with readers through a blog entails staying abreast of industry news and providing good, original commentary on it. As another recent report shows, writing in the manner of professional journalists—a practice known as corporate journalism—is the best way to set your content apart from that of competitors.

Blog posts should be not only well-written, but frequent. At the very least, you should be posting once per week. Of course, as a lawyer, your priority is practicing law. It therefore makes sense to outsource attorney writing services.

Consider that 12% of the professional marketers surveyed by Social Media Examiner outsource content creation to third parties. That’s second only to web design and development. You’d probably never dream of designing your own website, for obvious reasons. But the reasons to consider professional writing services, as research proves, are no less obvious.