Speaker 1: 0:05

What is social listening and how can I use it to help my firm stay ahead of competitors? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen.

Speaker 1: 0:14

Social listening we're going to get into what it is is a lot more than just keeping an eye on your law firm's online mentions. It's really about understanding the bigger picture here. At its core, though, social listening is basically involving tracking digital conversations, trends, mentions, all of the things that are related to your firm online and your competitors, and some of the key topics that are related to your niche in the legal world. It's not just about seeing what's being said. It's about digging much deeper in to understand the why behind the conversation. Think of social monitoring as a basic alert system that tells you when your firm's name pops up online, and while that's useful, social listening goes a step further by actually analyzing these mentions to extract some insights. So, for an example, we might notice a spike in discussions about a recent legal regulation, a new law. This could signal a potential opportunity for us to publish a blog or host a webinar or publish some content that addresses the topic. The distinction here is important. Social monitoring is reactive. We are monitoring what's happening and we're doing something about it, but social listening, on the other hand, this is a little bit more proactive. It allows us to start anticipating our clients' needs, spot these emerging trends before our competitors do, and then start adjusting our marketing strategies essentially in real time. It empowers our firm to not only follow the conversation but actually stay ahead of the conversation. This is something we can finally actually do now, and we can adapt it to meet the market demands for each vertical and for each physical geographical market.

Speaker 1: 1:56

Social listening offers a bunch of different advantages for our firms that can go beyond merely staying informed and adapting to the thing that just happened. It'll provide us some actionable insights that can enhance our approach to a couple of key areas. First is identifying client pain points, and you should know a little bit about this, but we can get a little bit more information now, and by actively monitoring conversations you can uncover challenges that people are going through, frustrations that people have with the system or with you even, and whether it's confusion over some kind of recent change in family law and we can write about that and explain it or dissatisfaction with lengthy court processes in a particular jurisdiction. These insights allow us to address these concerns proactively, before somebody else gets to it. So if we say, notice a surge in discussions about the complexities of estate planning, we can then create a guide or a host a webinar to help demystify the process. We can just provide content to answer the question, and this not only helps these people understand what's going on, but it's really positioning us as a helpful resource while attracting these clients and positioning us in the market as a leader.

Speaker 1: 3:07

And that's important because your firm's reputation can change really rapidly online and social listening helps us detect this negative feedback or, if there's misinformation or just bad, crazy reviews, praise whatever it is. It can help us detect this as soon as it appears and by responding quickly and thoughtfully and usually as completely as we ethically can, we can manage this public perception much more effectively. So, whether this is addressing a negative review on social media, correcting an inaccurate blog post about your services, timely responses show that your firm is attentive and it's committed to actual client satisfaction and preserving its reputation. That isn't always a bad thing. But social listening isn't just about tracking and analyzing what's being said about your firm. It's about understanding what people are saying about your competition too, and by monitoring your competitors' activities, their reviews, their public discussions, you can identify what they're doing well and where they could be falling short. This helps you find gaps in the market, adapt your strategies to outshine competitors and capitalize on any emerging trends that your competitors are missing. Social listening is a direct line on what your target audience actually cares about. If legal topics like data privacy, personal injury compensation whatever it is if any of these are trending or getting some mentions, your firm can start producing content that addresses these issues. And this approach, while it is a little bit just monitoring, it, not only helps your firm stay relevant, but it also boosts engagement by delivering content that resonates with what people are talking about.

Speaker 1: 4:41

And implementing social listening doesn't have to be a daunting task. What people are talking about and implementing social listening doesn't have to be a daunting task, and the way you can really move this from just monitoring and being reactive to being proactive is by using some of the right tools, because with these tools, you can start uncovering valuable insights and things that are going to shape your marketing and your client outreach strategies, so that you can really understand what people want and how to give it to them. So first, we want to choose the right tools that are actually going to give us the information that is happening and allow us to set our settings so that we can actually find topics coming up in the trending area before, before it really happens. So the tools like Hootsuite, buffer, mention, brandwatch and I'm not going to list these in the show notes so you can just go and Google them these all offer features that allow you to monitor conversations across maybe different social platforms or search engines on forums, even news sites. In a lot of cases, hootsuite is really great for those that are already managing social media accounts if your firm already has accounts because you can go ahead and integrate your monitoring with your scheduling and you can start to build out more complex automations and systems there. And then things like Brandwatch are great for deeper analytics, good for firms that want to get into sentiment analysis.

Speaker 1: 5:55

There are a lot of similar tools. Just using this as an example, just using this as an example. But Mention, on the other hand, is one of the more beginner-friendly, entry-level tools that's focusing on brand mentions, industry keywords, kind of like a more advanced version of Google's alert system. Each of these tools has a good strength, but what you really need to figure out is what your firm's specific needs are, what your budget is is usually a factor here, and how you want to tune this tool and scale it so that you can effectively work with it later on. But once we've chosen a tool, we're going to skip ahead.

Speaker 1: 6:27

The next step here is to set up the tracking for the relevant keywords, the phrases, and we want to set up terms like divorce lawyer near me, personal injury claims, things that are kind of like PPC, and things like your name, your competitor's name, and you could even do broader legal topics, like all the family law, all of estate planning, all of criminal law or data privacy laws, or, if you're working in criminal DUI regulations, to catch all the emerging trends that are coming up, whether these are people that are actually talking about this or whether it's coming up at the new. Whatever type of trend this is, we want to. We're we're covering all the bases for the topics we care about and when you're adding names, don't forget to include all the variations of your firm's name to make sure you capture all the mentions. Usually the systems will have some kind of setup to make sure they capture misspellings and and errors and things like that, but make sure if you have an acronym or you have a couple of different names or something people refer to you by and your name or even your lawyer's names. You may want to add those to the system as well. But once you have this all set up, here's the thing.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Social listening isn't just a one-time activity. It needs to be part of your regular workflow. So right after we set it up, we need to add it to our system. So set aside some time weekly, maybe daily, to review your social listening data and identify your actionable insights. And if you're an attorney who has a marketing person, tell them this needs to be added to the workflow. And if you want reports on it, get reports on it. But you need to make sure that they're they're doing this If they're doing any kind of social advertising or anything where we're creating content and need to be staying on top of trends, and what we want to do with these reports is look for patterns.

Speaker 1: 8:06

So things like recurring questions, spikes in particular topics or particular words or whatever it is, that's sort of a little bit not in the norm. If we can look at those things and then use that to start adjusting our marketing strategies, we can figure out what people are talking about. For smaller firms, a weekly review could be okay, it might be enough, but for larger firms, if you're doing a lot of advertising, if you're spending a lot of money on social, then doing daily monitoring to stay on top of all the high volumes of data is usually advisable. And now the juicy step for people like me is integrating all of this into your marketing, into your client outreach and really just into that whole sales funnel process, because the insights that we gain from social listening should inform all the aspects of our marketing and communication strategies. If we notice that there's a rise, even a little one, in discussions about a personal injury law firm following a change in local regulations, we might want to start shifting some of our ad copy or writing a piece of content, a blog post, or posting something on social media about navigating through these changes. If we notice, like we talked about, that clients are constantly talking about legal fees, then we want to address these topics in our content and maybe even in our advertising, so that we can emphasize our transparency, our flexible payment options. Whatever it is, we need to be using social listening insights to refine everything from email newsletters to social posts, outreach efforts, even direct mail efforts, because all of this ensures that our messaging is resonating not only with what we're doing, but resonating with the current concerns and the interests of our target audience. And by consistently applying this making sure we systemize it, do it every day, do it every week we can turn social listening data into a really significant strategic advantage that allows us to stay ahead of a competitive legal landscape Before we go.

Speaker 1: 10:01

I want to talk about two of the biggest pitfalls that firms need to be aware of that you need to be aware of to get the most value from the whole social listening process. The first thing here is ignoring the broader context, because it's really easy, when you're reading through social media contexts, to fall into the trap of reacting to every mention. But social listening is about so much more than just these immediate responses. Yes, they're good, it's good to engage with people, but the context of everything matters. So a sudden spike of mentions about a specific legal issue might seem urgent. It might seem something we could address right now. Urgent, it might seem something we could address right now, but if it turns out it's tied to a broader trend, like a new law taking effect.

Speaker 1: 10:42

Your strategy needs to include education for your audience on the topic and not just engaging with every individual comment. It might be a lot more effective to take a beat, create an article and then send that out instead of copy and pasting a result. Then we can send the traffic to our website. The goal here is to really just understand the bigger picture and how to use those elements to guide your firm's overall approach, rather than just getting caught up in the isolated conversations or getting dragged down by some kind of negative comment. Another big mistake is really limiting your social listening to just tracking mentions of your firm's name, because, yes, it is crucial to know what's being said about your practice and about you, but you need to really understand what's happening with the broader legal trends and what your competitors are doing.

Speaker 1: 11:30

So if a rival firm or a new firm that you may not consider them a rival, but the reality is, if you don't get the clients, they might, if they're getting attention for a new service, that's a cue to start assessing your offerings and see if you can do that too Identify these potential gaps and try to fill them. If we focus just on what people are saying about us, we're going to be completely blind to the opportunities and, more importantly, to the threats that exist outside our immediate circle or bubble. Now we've really just scratched the surface of what you can do with social listening, and a lot of what you can do with social monitoring can get you part of the way there. But once you take it to that next level, where you start to really understand what your clients are saying and what that means and integrating it into your strategy, it can be an incredibly effective way to not only generate new business but make the business that you are generating much better for you and the clients that you have much happier. Remember, it's really about listening to the market as a whole. We do want to understand what they're saying about you, but we have to get outside our echo chamber.

Speaker 1: 12:35

If you haven't subscribed to the paid version of the podcast, make sure to do that before we have our next episode at the beginning of the next month. We have a new episode at the beginning of the month for our paid subscribers and we still have the rest of the month free for our subscribers. But make sure you're subscribing to the paid version of the podcast so you get that episode at the beginning of the month. We're talking through some of the best tricks for advertising, some of the best ways to automate things and some of the details that we just aren't going to get into in this version of the podcast. So make sure you subscribe to that and we'll be back soon. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more. Thanks,