1 Hour and You Can Manage Your Law Firm’s Facebook Page

What I want to go over today is how to use a Facebook Business Page for your elder law or estate planning law firm, if you don’t have much time or resources to manage that.

So what do I mean by that?

When we have a lot of conversations with elder law and estate planning firms, one of the things that they think that we do is post on Facebook. And so, “Do you guys post on Facebook?” And the answer to that is basically no, but yes, as well. We don’t post on your Facebook Page, like just random posts, motivational quotes or pictures or whatever it may be. What we’re doing is we’re posting actual ads, which aren’t on your Facebook Page. They come from your Facebook Page, but they aren’t showing up on your Facebook Page. We don’t have to go into much detail of that right now. What we’re going to talk about is posting actual images and posting videos or whatever it may be on your Facebook Business Page. And if you don’t have one, why you need to have one and kind of our thoughts on what’s the point of even having one of those to begin with.

Is Facebook Really Necessary?

So to have a Facebook Business Page is completely free. You have to have a personal page to start your Facebook Page, and then you can add team members or anything like that to your Facebook Page, so they can manage those. The reason you want to have one is because people are expecting you to have one. And so it ends up being just like your website, almost like an online business card. So if I’m looking for an estate planning attorney, and I’m online browsing or somebody gives me a recommendation, “Oh you need to check out Blake Law Firm,” or whatever it may be, and I’m interested and want to do my own research before I just blindly give you a call, I’ll go to your website, maybe take a look at that. I’ll look to see if you have a Facebook Page, and then I’ll take a look at that and maybe I’ll look at your Google reviews or something just to see if this is even existing, kind of like to legitimize your business.

I just want to make sure I’m making the right decision to give you a call to begin with. And so that’s why you need to have a Facebook Page, if I’m looking at three different law firms to even give a call, the one that has a presence with a good website. The one that has their Google My Business page, and the one that has a Facebook Page, that’s probably going to be the one that I’m going to be giving a call because it looks like they’re pretty active. They have a website. They’re doing things. And so that’s who I’m probably going to be giving a call first. So the one thing that a lot of attorneys find is that they’re like, “Well, I don’t get any business. “I don’t get much business out of my Facebook Page,” or “It takes up a lot of my time, or I just get a lot of different push backs on Facebook Page”. And I want to let you know, you’re probably not going to get a lot of new clients just because you have a Facebook Page.

Facebook Keeps your Firm “Top of Mind”

You don’t just put up a Facebook Page and magically clients are going to be like, “Wow I really want to come over to your law firm.” It’s not going to happen. The reason you have the Facebook Page, and the reason you spend the time to develop that Facebook Page is because people that are current clients of yours, they can like that page. They can post a review if you wish to have reviews posted on that Facebook Page, and it can keep your firm top of mind to people that have interacted with you in the past. And so that’s why you want to have it.

It doesn’t take much time at all to manage. You can spend as little or as much time managing that resource as you can possibly imagine. And what we’re going to go over today is how to spend as little time managing that to get the most results you possibly can with the most minimal time. And I’m not saying this is the right way to do it, I’m saying this is the right way for some firms to do it. You know, maybe you’re a small or solo practice. You want to have a presence on Facebook, but you want to spend an hour a week at the max dealing with it. And this is going to be the way that you can go ahead and do that.

So first, while I’m doing that I want to share my screen. We don’t have a law firm Facebook Business Page for our company, but I did want to show you ours, since it’s going to be very similar to what you would see and then kind of walk you through as I talk about the different things that you can do. I can walk you through kind of where those settings are on the video. And if you’re not watching the video, say you’re just listening to this audio or you’re reading the transcript, don’t worry about it. What we’ll walk through, you’ll be able to understand by reading this transcript or just by listening to the audio. You can always come back to the video if you have any questions or send our team an email at team@bambiz.net. We’ll get back to you with any answers that you have. And again, if you do have any questions while I go through this, and you’re watching this live, feel free to throw those in the chat box. So let me go ahead and share my screen here for you. All right, so you should be looking at my screen now. All right, let me just move this out of the way.

The Two Photos You’ll Need

So what you want to do at the beginning, when you set up your Facebook Page for the first time, there are two things that you’ll need to have an image for to get it going. So one is this right here. It’s a cover photo. It’s at the top. You can see that ours, it says, it’s this picture of a seminar with some people raising their hand, and it says, “We Help Elder Law & Estate Planning Attorneys “Book More Consultations and Secure More Clients.” And so our recommendation is to do a cover photo that has a call to action in it. So that call to action could be telling people what you do and having your phone number or email address, whatever it may be, but that’s the first thing people see when they come to your page. So you want to have it be friendly, have people figure out what you do and who you help and have a call to action if that works for you. So it should, you’re a law firm. So put your phone number in there. Put your email in there, whatever it may be.

The second is going to be this profile photo here. Ours is our logo. If you’re a small or solo practice, and if it was me and just like the Blake Law Firm, for example, if that was it, maybe I’d put my headshot there. I would actually recommend using a headshot photo over a logo, ’cause the actual headshot logo is going to connect with your potential clients on a more personal level than having just this logo here or your firm logo, whatever it might be. So put a nice profile photo of either yourself or your firm or whatever. Make it personal, and if that’s not the case, if you’re a large firm or something, and you don’t want to use your photos, the second best thing would be to put your firm logo there. And then the cover photo, top here, you want to put a call to action and a nice picture.

If you don’t know where to create a cover photo like this, there’s a free service out there called Canva, canva.com. And you can go there and they have some free templates, and you can easily make a Facebook cover photo for your page super easy. So definitely check that resource out. It won’t take you more than 15 minutes to put together a really awesome cover photo in the right format, and then they walk you through it. And it’s completely free. So once you have those two things, you want to go and edit your About page.

What to Put on Your About Page

Your About page is here, if people were looking at it. And so what you’d actually want to do is go into Settings, which is up here on the right as of today, and then you can see all the different things in here. You can go to Page Info, and then you can edit this. And this is pretty much what’s going to be in your About section. And so you want to put in here as much information as you possibly can. We could definitely be doing better at this, but we’re not a law firm, so it doesn’t make a difference. And a physical location like an office like that, our team is mobile. We’re a remote team. So we don’t have one physical location, so that doesn’t work in this example. But I’ll kind of show you here what I’m talking about.

So you want to make sure that you have your phone number in here. You want to make sure that you have your website in here. You want to make sure that there’s an email that’s answered in here. So basically what you’re doing here is you’re showing people that they can get ahold of you very easily if they need to get ahold of you. You want to give people any reason possible. If they actually came to your Facebook Page, they can contact you. You don’t want to make it a struggle for them to contact you. You want it to be very easy. You want to be able to put your firm address, if it has a street address, you want to put it right in there. If you can visit there, everything. You want to be able to have it very easily accessible for somebody to find your business. So make sure you have all that in there.

If you have a price range, you can put the price range. If you have products, you can put the products. Estate planning, elder law, asset protection, trusts, living wills, whatever it may be. You can put those in here as different products and stuff aswell. It’s is very easy to do. Then basically what you’re going to want to do is just kind of go through this little checkbox and turn on and off some different things. So if you go in, I’ll show you one of these. Page Visibility, you want that to be published. Verified if you can. All this stuff is pretty much going to be on there normally. Let’s see.

Visitor Posts

There’s one thing in here I wanted to show you. Visitor Posts. So some firms, this is a setting you might want to turn on or off. It says, “Anyone can publish to the Page. “Anyone can add photos or videos to the Page.” If you don’t want a random person to post something weird on your page for some reason, and you want minimal time to manage this Facebook Page, you can turn that off. You can have it so people can’t post stuff to your page. People can’t add photos and videos to your page, only you can. And that could just easily allow you to moderate the page, ’cause there’s no moderation needed, because random people, visitors, can’t post stuff to your page. So you might want to turn that off. Everything else is probably, you can restrict your page to people in the United States. I would probably do that. Most everybody that we work with is in the United States, so that’s what I would do.

One of the Most Valuable FB Tools to Use

Messaging, here’s a good one here. And so messaging. People can send your Facebook Page messages, and those are going to be one of the most valuable things and the hardest things for a firm with limited resources to be able to moderate. And so what you’re actually going to want to do, you can prompt people to send messages. Facebook just says, “Hey, send this place a message,” or whatever, and that’s fine. This is where you want to focus your time on right here. This Response Assistant. And so in this Response Assistant, it’s basically instant replies. And so what you can do is you can go to Automated Responses, so you click that. Let’s see if it’ll let me do that. All right, cool.

And so Instant Reply, we have it turned off, ’cause we’re moderating this. Your firm might not want it turned off. You probably want to turn this on, because if somebody sends you a message, “My mother-in-law needs help, blah, blah.” And they send you this huge Facebook message, and something’s on their mind right then and there. And so if you don’t get back to this person pretty quickly, they’re going to respond. They’re going to keep messaging people until somebody gets back to them with what they need. And so what you can do is you can edit the Facebook canned message, and then you’ll be able to turn it on, I don’t know. Yeah, set timing, yeah. I’m not going to do this, but you can respond in here instantly, in Instant Reply, and you can put in a message here.

And so what I would say, like I said, your goal is to address their message, let them know that you’re here to help and guide to the step that you’d like them to take. Andthat’s going to be a phone call typically to your firm. So you would want to sayin this message something like, “Thank you for taking the time to message Blake Law. “We’d love to be able to address every inquiry “that comes to us on Facebook Messenger, “but in order to keep things organized, “we’d appreciate it if you could give our office a call. “You can easily reach us at 555-111-2222. “We look forward to taking your call “and learning more about your unique situation. “Thank you.” So basically what you’re doing is you’re saying, “Hey, we’d love to be able to answer your message, “unfortunately we can’t. “We’re busy.” You don’t want to say busy, obviously. You just want to say that you’re just unable to respond back to these and you wish that you could. And then you’re prompting them to call, so you can address their unique situation. And you want to put your phone number there.

So hopefully the goal is somebody sends your Facebook Page a message, because you’re using limited time and resources, Facebook’s automatically going to reply to that message that’s sent by somebody with your canned response telling them to call your firm. And then from that point, your office would be able to reach back out, answer the phone or answer their voicemail or whatever and take care of that potential client right away. And so that helps you with moderating the page, ’cause you’re not always going onto the Inbox and looking to see if you got any messages, because your instant replies are doing that for you. Maybe somebody sends you a message and you come on here once a week or whatever it may be, and you see somebody sent a message and they didn’t call your office, well obviously you can personally respond to them at that time, but you don’t have to feel like Facebook is sucking the life out of you, because you’re always checking your Inbox. You don’t have to do that anymore, so use an instant reply. Highly recommended for estate planning and elder law firms that want to minimize the time they spend on their Facebook Page.

Add a Tab or Two

You can also do some really cool things. Let’s see, I’ll show you. Let’s go back. Inside of the settings here, I’m not sure if it’s going to show it on, okay here we go, Templates and Tabs. And again, mine’s going to be a little bit different. Bambiz is going to be different, since we’re a marketing agency and not a law firm, but what you can do is you can, all the little tabs that are on your Facebook Page, you can turn on and off and switch around most of them. And so what do I mean by that? So like right now, on the side of our page you’ll see it says like the services we offer, some weekly tips, they can subscribe to our newsletter, about us, posts, photos, videos, community, et cetera. Some of the other ones, I’m not going to change that. Add a Tab. Maybe it’ll show some different things. It would have like Reviews, Shop, Jobs, Groups, Events, et cetera. And you can add those tabs.

One of the things that I would recommend if you want to have an easily moderated Facebook Page, you can exclude different tabs like the Reviews tab or the Offers tab or the Notes tab or the Groups tab or the Live Videos tab, and the reason I say that is because say you don’t want to be able to even put a review, good or bad, on your Facebook Page, just ’cause you don’t want to deal with it. You don’t want the worry. You can turn off reviews. And then, now you don’t have to worry about it. Your Facebook Page is your Facebook Page, and there’s not a Reviews tab anymore. And so you can kind of allow it to, let me show you. Let’s go back to our page so you can kind of see what I’m talking about.

All right, so, like over here, those are the tabs. And so if you can put whatever you want to over there, and the ones that you use, you can use. I mean honestly, Posts, maybe Images, that type of thing, and that’s all you’d really have to worry about there. Let’s see. I wanted to go over, if anybody has any questions at all, throw them in the chat. I know we’re covering a lot, and we’re covering it fast. But our time is limited. And so I want to make sure we cover everything that we can. Let’s see here. Gotcha, okay. So now that you’ve set your page up, you’ve got the right tabs over here. You’ve got a call to action cover. You’ve got a nice profile page, and you’ve put your instant replies on, so people that send you messages on your Facebook Page, they get prompted to call your firm or whatever that call to action is. Your About page, you’ve put in your story, your mission, your vision, that type of thing in the About section. So people that are on your Facebook Page know who you are, who you help and that type of thing.

Make Sure You Mention These…

Oh yeah, that’s one thing I didn’t go over that I wanted to go over. In that About section, when you’re putting in like what do you do, you want to talk about your mission, your vision, how you help others and you don’t want to worry about telling people what you do. They know what you do, they’re on your Facebook Page. They know you’re a lawyer. You want to tell people how you help guide them to the end result. That’s all you want to do. You want to tell them how you are a helper, and you help people do x. And that’s all. And you don’t want it to be salesy. You don’t want it to be in law jargon. You want it to be in common language that’s easy to understand, and you want to be a helper, and that’s kind of how you want to structure that About. I forgot to go over that. I wanted to make sure I did address that.

Keep it Active

Keep your page active. People are going to look to see, we work with lawyers all the time, and sometimes we’ll go to pages and they update ’em three times a day, and sometimes we go and the last update was in 2016. And so what you want to do is basically at the minimum what we would recommend to optimize your page for, and this is even the direction we’re going now, and I’ll kind of cover that real quick, is just once a week. Just post on your Facebook Page once a week a piece of content, something real, not like a blog that one of your vendors gave you or something like that. You want it to be, maybe it’s a testimonial. Maybe it’s a picture of a couple people hanging out around the office. Maybe it’s one of your seminars, a picture of the seminar, and you’re just thanking people or whatever it may be. Maybe it’s a couple tips. Maybe there’s some new news out, like when the VA changed their rules for qualifying for benefits. Maybe you do a post about that. It doesn’t have to be long. We’re talking like two or three sentences, a 30-second video, a simple photo, but we want it to be real, one time a week content that nobody can get anywhere else but from you and that makes you relatable to the person that’s seeing it. And we recommend you do this by what we call batching content.

Batching Content

So what you’re actually going to be doing is we say once a month, in your schedule you block out one hour, and you take that one hour and you write, you film, you do whatever, you take pictures, you just set it all up for whatever that is, four pieces of content. There’s four weeks in the month, four pieces of content. Once you’re done with that, you can save it in a folder on your computer, and you can actually go into Facebook, and when
you click it here, you can set up your posts, type in what you want, and then click down here. Let’s see, do do do. And there’s, right here, Share Now. You can Schedule, and then you can just click on, I want to schedule it on Monday of next week at whatever time and then you can just schedule it. And then, that’s it. And then you can click Schedule. You can do that four times, and then you can be done. And then you can just go back in your calendar and know, “Hey, next month on Friday from 11 till 12, “I’m going to do my batch of content again.” So one hour a month you can easily schedule and post four pieces of content. And that way, when somebody does come to your Facebook Page, they see that your Facebook Page is active. They can see what you’re about and that type of thing.

Facebook’s Algorithm on Posts

Now, the reason I say only once a week, and some people aren’t going to agree with me, and that’s fine, but based off of our own knowledge and the knowledge that we have for estate planning and elder law firms around the country and just what Facebook’s doing with their algorithm, what you actually need to know is and I’m not making this up, so I have website here I’m going to show you with some statistics in a second that kind of reiterate what I’m talking about. Not many people actually see your posts. So when you post, let’s just say next Monday you have a really nice post, and it’s a recap of your workshop that you held last week. So you’re like, “Thank you so much “for everybody that came out to our workshop on Thursday. “We had a great time meeting everybody. “We hope to see some new faces “at our upcoming event on August 2nd,” whatever and that’s a picture of your workshop. It looks awesome. And you have, let’s just say you have a 1000 people that like your page. All right. I don’t know, 40 to 60 people might see that actual post, maybe, maybe on a good day, when you post that. And those are the people that actually liked your page.

And in my world, although I want to keep myself top of mind on the Facebook world for people that like us, my main concern if I’m thinking about Facebook, is I want new people to see me. I want new people to start seeing my stuff. And so only a very small percentage, somewhere between four to six, I think the article that I’m going to show you says six point something percent of the people that actually like your page see your posts. So that’s a really high reason why you actually need to be focused on building your own list.

Owning Your Contact List

So a Facebook like really means nothing. Back when Facebook started and everybody saw your posts, it was awesome, because you post something and everybody that liked your page would see it. And it was like sending out an email. That’s why email marketing’s really awesome, because if you have the email address and you send the email address to that person, they’re either going to have to look at your email and press the Delete button, or they’re going to read your message. So either way they’re going to see it. You’re going to stay top of mind. Or they have to go in and they have to click on Subscribe and you’re still top of mind. Owning your contact list is the way to go and having a Facebook like necessarily isn’t the best thing, but when you post some people will see it.

My goal is I want new people that find my Facebook Page to see that it’s active and that good content is being put up there. Even though it’s once a week, it’s active. It’s not from 2016. It’s not from two months ago. Hey, they posted last Thursday, or they posted on Monday. Okay, cool. These people are real people, they’re active. They’re not posting three or four times a day for only 30 people to see it that already like them, that probably are already a client anyways. It’s just not worth it. For some firms, it definitely is worth it, but again, we’re going over the least amount of time with the least amount of resources to get the maximum impact on the Facebook Business Page.

Facebook Marketing Stats for 2019

And so some of the statistics here, I found this website. Here it is, yeah. A post’s average organic reach is only around 6.4% of the page total likes. See, and then some people are saying 2% instead of 6.4. But this was a really cool website I found, “10 Things You Need to Know, “Facebook Marketing Stats for 2019.” And I’ll run through these real quick because they’re kind cool.

39% of Facebook users say they want to follow business pages because they want to receive special offers. Now obviously you’re not serving cheese pizzas or ice cream or anything like that. It’s totally different, but if you’re providing something of value, because value fora pizza place is going to be a pizza. But if you’re providing something of value, so maybe that’s, I don’t know, people aren’t coming in for wills every month. But if you’re providing maybe like an educational video once a month, maybe that’s something that people are going to come back for because it’s free content that’s going to be valuable to people that are interested in what you have to offer. So that could be your special offer, your special offers. I give away a $500 value educational video every month on our Facebook Page, so make sure you like it. You can kind of get your likes up. But again, only 6.4% according to them are seeing those, so it’s not like you need to spend much time doing that. But if you want to grow that, that’s the option.

40% of Facebook users only access the site through the mobile app. We know that most of our workshop registrations, people that download your materials, they come from mobile. Effective length for, you don’t have to worry about that. We work with the ads. But yeah, you want everything to be very catchy. Videos with auto-playing sound annoy people, yes. Closed captions increase viewing time. Yeah, that’s definitely true. We always put closed captions on the advertisements that we run. Three seconds to capture attention, that’s correct. Shorter posts, more interaction than longer posts. I’ll share this link with you in the comments, in the transcript. So you can actually come to this webpage and check it out. Lots of good stuff here in this article.

But what I really was looking for was just to kind of, this and they have some links to the sources here. But not many people are seeing your organic posts on Facebook. So think pretty much to wrap it up, and what we kind of went over today just on how to manage that Facebook Page, make it optimized for as little time and little resources with as much impact. You’re looking probably two hours to start it all up, if you don’t have a Facebook Page yet. And then one to two hours a month max to manage it, because you’re going to batch that content. You’re going to schedule that content. You’re going to have that auto-reply going on the messages. And then, it’s just going to be there. It’s going to be that business card, and it’s going to keep people understanding that you are an active firm, and it’s going to give you more credibility in the community.

The Real Purpose of Your Facebook Page

Like I said, it’s not going to generate you a whole bunch of new clients, if you’re doing it this way or you’re doing it another way. That’s not the purpose of the Facebook Page, but it does legitimize your firm and provide an outlet where you can connect on a personal level to those that want to be connected with you. You know, the only way for social media to really generate new business is to pay the social media companies to run the ads. And so when you’re running the ads, you need to run the right kind of ads that are actually generating contact information, so you can own that contact information. That’s going to be the most important thing.

So you want the email address. You want the phone number. You want their name. Most of our clients are attorneys that are doing workshops. We want them to sign up and register and attend the workshops. If they’re not doing workshops, they’re downloading resources, like eBooks or guides. Or they’re signing up for recorded presentations, like a recorded webinar, a recorded speech. And they’re providing that contact information, so you’re able to follow up with those people and get them on an email newsletter. So you can send them the communication when you want to send them the communication. And then obviously if they’re doing workshops you can email them as well and you’re able to follow up with them for the workshops.

Don’t Do This…

One thing I did want to mention is some people are like, “I boosted a post.” We would definitely recommend never boosting a post, because when you’re boosting a post, what you’re actually doing is instead of that 6% of people that are seeing it organically without paying, now more people that like your page already are going to see that post, and for whatever you’re spending, $10, $20, $100 or more, and you’re wasting your money doing that, unless you have a call to action. More people might see your posts, but you need to have a way to engage with them, get them to do something. If you’re paying money for that ad, you want those people that are seeing the ad, you want a percentage of those people to be doing something that moves them along the path to becoming a client of yours.

Then so just boosting a post that says something like, or maybe it’s an article you thought was interesting and you boost it. And more people saw it, but they didn’t do anything. You just paid Facebook or whoever money to share that to more people that didn’t get you any ROI at all, zero ROI. And I’m a fan of ROI, so if I’m going to boost a post, which I’m not going to boost, I’m actually going to run an ad. I’m going to run an ad to qualified, targeted people that I know are more than likely going to want to interact with it, that haven’t seen my stuff before, or that have seen my stuff before and were interested but didn’t take action. And so I’m going to retarget people. And then I’m going to make them do something that moves them further along that process to, “I found out about Blake Law Firm,” to “I’m interested in Blake Law Firm,” to “Now I’ve given my contact information “to Blake Law Firm because of something “that interests me,” to “I’m going to set up that consultation “to attend that workshop,” whatever it might be, “and now I’m going to become a retained client for that firm.” So that’s the process in place that if I’m spending money on ads, that’s what I want to have happen.

That’s pretty much it. Let me look back in the chat box to make sure I didn’t miss anything. We have lots of shy people out here. So definitely ask those questions if you have those questions. All right. Well, pretty much wrapping it up. We’re right about that 30-minute mark.