The title may sound like an oxymoron, but some Biglaw heavy-hitters have plunged into the social media world and are actually pretty good at it. While DLA Piper may not be delivering Kim Kardashian worthy takes on Instagram, they have built a cottage following showing off firm culture with shots of attorneys receiving awards and performing volunteer work. It’s a forward-thinking marketing push that might not seem obvious for Biglaw.
Good2bSocial releases an annual scorecard for law firm social media efforts and this year DLA Piper secured the top spot, with White & Case, Norton Rose Fulbright, Baker McKenzie and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe close behind.
[Good2bSocial founder and CEO Guy] Alvarez also said that although adoption rates are high, law firms often lag behind other professional service industries, particularly the Big Four, when it comes to effective usage.
“A lot of firms are still using social media as sort of a one-way content marketing tool,” he said. “The ones that struggle are just putting up promotional content. Social media is meant to engage and be social.”
No kidding.
Still, law firms simply being on social media is a development worthy of praise.
That lag in “effective usage” is why the solid Instagram presence among firms is a little surprising. To the extent firms play in the social media world, one might assume they’d just now be dipping into Facebook since that’s appropriately played out for law firms to think it’s cool. But in reality, Facebook is already on the outs with the more savvy firms:
On the flip side, “I was surprised at how much and how quickly firm usage of Facebook has declined,” Alvarez said. “Cambridge Analytica and privacy issues helped move that along. We saw some decline last year, but this year was a huge drop. Some firms have given up on Facebook completely.”
A few Am Law ranked firms are even engaging with YouTube for recruiting, which is such a natural use of the platform that it’s surprising that only 13 percent of firms are using it.
Unsurprisingly, LinkedIn boasts a strong law firm presence as it’s appropriately boring for the law firm environment, but paid LinkedIn accounts are narrowly outnumbered by Instagram with 31 percent of firms owning an Instagram account. Marketing teams in these global firms must be pretty plugged in.
A perusal of firm pages have found a woeful shortage of dank memes, but whatever they’re doing must work for them.
DLA Piper Leads Big Law in Social Media as More Firms Shun Facebook: Report [American Lawyer]