Law Firm Social Media Strategy: Should Facebook’s Decrease In Ad Space Scare Attorneys Away

For years now, attorneys have utilized Facebook as a top online marketing tool, taking advantage of the platform’s 1.32 billion daily active users to garner attention for their firm. For many law firm marketers, setting up advertisements that appear in Facebook’s news feed has been a key part of their social media strategy. These ads are quick to set up, allow attorneys to reach a specific target audience, and come at a relatively inexpensive cost.

While there’s never been any sure fire method for getting a particular Facebook advertisement or boosted post noticed, having the ability to get words, images, or videos in front of the faces of prospective clients or others in the industry has become a powerful tool for attorneys. But, as Facebook continues to grow, and gets more and more businesses wanting to advertise on its pages, getting a law firm seen on Facebook has become a much more difficult task. Here’s what you need to know.

A Change In Priority

In 2016, Facebook made it clear that their users’ experience would be the company’s top focus moving forward, even if it came at the expense of upsetting those advertising on the site.

About halfway through the year, Facebook announced that a new algorithm would hold dominion over it’s users news feeds. This new algorithm resulted in posts from a user’s friends and family being shown higher and more frequently on a user’s timeline, and a decrease in the visibility of posts made by brands and organizations. Facebook business advertising was not eliminated from the equation completely by this change, but the organic reach of business ads certainly took a large hit.

While this change was a shock to the system for many law marketers, it did not doom Facebook business advertising as some had speculated it would. It did however, put a larger importance on paid boosts, and making sure paid advertisements were filtered out to the right people.

Running Out of Space

Most law firm marketers have made their peace with the fact that they have to pay to really get their advertisements and content seen by a large crowd of people that is not already following them. But, what if paying for ads and content boosts still made it far from a guarantee that they would be seen?

Here are two Facebook advertising notes from this year to be aware of:

1. During a July conference call with analysts, Facebook CFO Dave Wehner reiterated that he expects a slowdown in the company’s revenue growth this year, as it reaches the limit of the number of ads it can show in its News Feed, according to Business Insider.
2. According to AdEspresso, Facebook has seen a large increase in its number of advertisers. In March 2016 the platform had 3 million businesses advertising on the platform. This past April, only a little over a year later, the number had increased to 5 million businesses.

With ad space becoming limited, and the number of businesses advertising on Facebook increasing, there would appear to be fair reason for concern about maintaining Facebook visibility for your law firm.

How Should Law Firm Marketers React?

This has become a rather frustrating situation for law firm marketers, as more and more people continue to sign-up with Facebook, while at the same time it is becoming harder and harder to reach those people on the platform. It almost seems cruel.

Law firm marketers may feel obligated to combat this issue, by increasing the amount of advertisements they make or the amount of money they pour into paid boosting. According to Dr. John Malatesta, a global leader in social media analytics and management, doing so could be a mistake. In a recent piece for Forbes, Dr. Malatesta suggests that this is not a time to overreact. He instead makes the case that Facebook’s saturated market presents a unique opportunity for marketers.

“It’s not about mass advertising and blanketing the news feeds with your branded content,” Dr. Malatesta said. “Now more than ever, marketing is about understanding your audience's needs and wants, carefully creating content that will resonate with them and delivering it in a cost-efficient way by tying outcomes to business goals.”

Later in the piece, Dr. Malatesta suggests marketers avoid investing more in Facebook, and instead:

• Optimize the segmentation and targeting of their audience
• Focus on creating and promoting the content loved by their audience
• Use advanced advertising options to further nurture their audience

It is also worth noting that Facebook uses relevance scores to deliver their users advertisements that are most relevant to them. With a higher relevance score, you won’t have to pay as much to reach your audience with ads and boosted posts. This is why producing high-quality content that will be relevant to their specific audience should still be the goal for law firm marketers.

Preparing For An Unknown Future

Facebook has previously stated that the volume of ads they can show users, will be a less significant revenue growth factor for the company moving forward. The company appears to be in the process of placing ads in new places, like on Facebook Messenger and inside Facebook videos, but the amount of advertising space Facebook will be able to offer moving forward, is still unknown at this moment.

The landscape of Facebook advertising has seen rapid change in recent years, so monitoring the situation is a must for attorneys spending money on site. But for the moment being, top law firm marketers should not be scared away by news of a decrease in ad space, and instead continue to stay the course with their Facebook content development and marketing strategies.

While many things about Facebook’s advertising future are unknown, one thing we do know is that video figures to play a large role in it. According to CNBC, the company has devoted much of its budget over the past year to creating more data centers and hiring more employees to handle an increased amount of videos on the website. So it may be a good idea for law firm marketers to brush up on their videography skills. We’ll be covering Facebook video creation in an upcoming blog post, so subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss it.