Social media marketing is instrumental in the growth and maintenance of any business. However, many law firms are baffled by how to use social media to attract new clients. Even worse, a significant number of attorneys believe that social media marketing is inessential to the growth of their business. In a survey conducted by Attorney at Work, 54% of respondents said that social media marketing is “more hype than reality.”

The inclination to believe that social media is not an integral part of any effective marketing strategy can be detrimental to the health of your law firm or business. The propensity for many people to believe that social media is not necessary may stem in part from their ineffective use of social media. Many business owners spend an excess amount of time and money on social without receiving the return on investment (ROI) they should.

However, navigating social media does not have to be a guessing game or a science experiment gone wrong. The following tips detail how you can use social media to achieve the business goals of your law firm:

Emojis, it seems, are everywhere these days, and not just in text messages from your children. The little icons—evolving from the ubiquitous yellow smiley face in the early days of the internet—can now be found on t-shirts, as plush toys, and even in upcoming feature film. For many people, emojis are associated with casual conversation and informal messaging, but a new study suggests that including them in your company’s mobile marketing campaigns could pay handsome dividends.

The Power of Images

The word “emoji” has origins in the Japanese language and is a combination of “e,” the Japanese word for “picture,” and “moji,” meaning “character.” You may have heard people referring to the little pictures as “emoticons,” but there are technical differences between the two, and the similarity of the two words is entirely coincidental. Without going into too much detail, an emoji is a pictorial representation of a thought, idea, or expression—such as a yellow winky-face—while an emoticon is a text-based display of an emotion—such as ;-).

Last week, the city of Chicago welcomed home the world champion Chicago Cubs. According to official estimates, approximately five million people took to the streets of the Windy City to celebrate with the team, making it the seventh largest gathering in human history and the largest ever on American soil. Imagine being able to reach a significant percentage of those five million people with a message about your firm and how you may be able to help them. Sounds pretty incredible but completely impossible, right?

Now take that five million and multiply it by 360. The result is 1.8 billion. That is how many people worldwide use Facebook—360 times more people that those who attended the Cubs’ victory celebration. Believe it or not, today’s digital technology offers you the ability to reach an increasingly large portion of those users with the right approach and guidance from marketing professionals.

Exceeding Expectations

If you are like many business owners, you have probably tried various ways of building name recognition and engaging prospective customers. You may have paid for billboards or television ads, or spent time and energy designing printed marketing materials. Many of these “tried and true” advertising efforts often do not deliver the results you expect, especially as more and more consumers have not picked up a physical magazine or newspaper in months and are using digital technology to skip TV commercials. This is precisely why business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly looking online—and particularly to social media outlets—for new ways to spread the message about their companies. There are many reasons that social media marketing can work for you, but the simplest are often the most important.

You Go to Your Audience

It is easy to convince yourself that when potential customers need services like those offered by your company, they will go looking on their own and eventually find you. While this may be to true, to an extent, your marketing strategy should not consist primarily of “wait until we are found.” Instead, social media marketing allows you to meet prospective clients where they are—and if numbers be trusted, they are most definitely on social media. This year, Facebook reached 1.5 billion—yes, billion with a “b”—active monthly visitors. Instagram boasts some 400 million active users while Twitter has about 320 million. These numbers undoubtedly include your clients of tomorrow and tailoring your marketing efforts to take your message to them is the first step.

In 1967, an American social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that tracked chains of acquaintances between people in the United States. Through a series of packages sent by mail, Milgram looked to test how closely connected we are with our fellow humans, even those living halfway across the country. The study became known as the “small world experiment,” and among Milgram’s test subjects, he found a median of five people between any two selected individuals, or as it has been referred to in pop culture and Hollywood trivia games, “six degrees of separation.”

Over the years, even while his conclusion has gained traction among average people, the scientific community has challenged its validity and the reliability of his experiment. Regardless of the conclusion’s veracity, the small world of Milgram’s theory has become even smaller with the introduction of the internet and social media. This is especially notable today, as the social media giant Facebook celebrates its 12th birthday.

Shrinking the Modern World