How To Craft The Perfect Social Media Policy For Your Law Firm

If you are like most attorneys, you probably only have a limited amount of time to devote to social media monitoring and posting, and are forced to heavily rely on your staff to help with the process. So how do you ensure that your firm’s social media posting is being handled correctly when it’s not directly in your hands?

The best solution is to establish a firm wide social media policy.

This policy will educate your entire staff on things like:

• What your firm is looking to accomplish through social media.
• What standards those who are creating posts should look to uphold.
• What to do when things go wrong.
• What level of individual accountability is expected.

It is important that all members of your law office have a clear understanding of how you expect them to behave on social media. This way you can encourage workers to be at their most creative and innovative when posting, and know that the quality reputation you have worked hard to cultivate for your firm will not be tarnished by an unsavory post.

The Importance of Having a Policy

Social media brings a ton of potential benefit for a firm, but also a high amount of risk. While getting your firm seen by a large number of online viewers means more attention for your business, it also means all of your firm’s online mistakes will be magnified. With this being the case, law offices employees need to be extremely careful not to make typos, inaccurate claims, or politically incorrect statements in their posts. Having just one of these types of blunders made can lead to a client or case being lost.

This is why law offices need to have a social media policy. Having a proper online networking strategy in place will provide an official protocol for employees to abide by and keep costly errors to a minimum. It will also put your employees in the frame of mind of always checking over their posts for anything that may embarrass the firm, before actually publishing.

Constructing Your Social Media Policy

When writing out your social media guidelines, you should look to establish the expectations, values, and standards you hope to see upheld by people posting on your social media accounts. There is no perfect social media policy for every firm to utilize, but here are some of the biggest things a quality law firm social media policy should cover.

Establish Firm Wide Goals

One of the best ways to make sure your firm’s posting priorities are always in the right place is to share goals that you want your firm to reach.

Things to cover in this section:

• What exactly does your firm hope to gain from being on social media?
• Which social networks do you hope to reach audiences through?
• In what ways do you hope to see people engage with you online?
• What does your firm consider to be worthwhile social content?
• How can employees be interesting in posts, while still remaining appropriate?

Set Rules For Posting From a Professional Law Account

Employees should always be mindful that they are representing your law office each time they post something on the company account. If an employee does make a post that upsets a current or prospective client, you may be put in the uncomfortable position of having to suspend or fire them. This can be avoided by including a crystal clear section in your social media policy about keeping posts professional.

Things to cover in this section:

• Make sure employees stray from injecting individual bias into company posts. If posts are going to include opinion, they should reflect the opinions of the entire firm.
• Warn employees against taking actions that will get your firm into legal trouble (i.e. sharing confidential case information, making libelous statements)
• Make sure employees always remain civil online, and use family friendly language.
• Tell employees to inject fun and humor into posts where they can, but never post anything that makes the firm come across as less than professional.

Create a Plan For Handling Negative Feedback

If you post on social media enough, chances are your firm will receive some kind of negative feedback. As long as this is not happening frequently, it is nothing to panic about. That being said, your firm should have a policy in place for what to do when things on social media go less than smoothly.

Things to cover in this section:

• What types of negative feedback are worth responding to?
• What is the best way to respond to negative feedback?
• Who at your firm do you trust to properly manage mistakes and negative comments?
• When is it appropriate for someone from your firm to issue an apology?

Discuss Posting On Personal Accounts

Just because you have a personal social media account does not mean there will not be professional consequences for what you post on it. Unless you keep your personal account private, anyone online can find the things you post. This is why your firm needs to make posting on personal accounts a part of its social media policy.

Things to cover in this section:

• Stress to employees that anything they post on their personal accounts can be found online and associated with the law office they work at.
• Ask employees to post on their personal accounts with the same level of professionalism as they would for a work account.
• Go over with employees what exactly they should not share on their accounts.
• Let employees know that there will be real consequences for embarrassing the company online, whether they did it intentionally or not.

Remember to Frequently Review Your Policy

The rules of social media engagement are always evolving and so should your social media policy. Your staff should try and go back to your policy as much as possible and see if there is anything that can be updated or changed. This is important to review, because as your firm grows, your social media goals and expectations may change. You may also find through navigating different social media experiences that there are important things you left out of the initial draft of your policy.

The process of course does not end there. You need to have at least one, if not multiple people in charge of making sure your social media policy is being read and followed by all employees. It is also important to make sure the policy is put in the hands of every new employees your firm hires. Doing all of this will help your law office maximize the amount of positive attention and leads it gains through social media, while minimizing customer relations headaches.