Business development | How to effectively reach out on social media

I have posited before that execution can drive strategy. It's based on the maxim Ready, Fire, Aim. And in the legal world, there's a lot to be said for doing more stuff. But it rarely happens. It's not that lawyers don't have enough on their plate, but seem overwhelmed in balancing the demands of fee earning and everything else.

When social media first hit the streets (circa 2007), everyone was quick to jump aboard the free platforms and, for a while, made hay whilst the sun shone in the hope that if they just did more stuff - firing off more push media messages that they would garner a whole heap of new connections, which, in turn, they could convert into new clients.

But in case you haven't noticed, there isn't exactly a bushel of success stories floating around where that methodology has brought home the bacon. Far from it. In most cases, firms have become disillusioned with the lack of engagement and drain ?on their limited marketing resources to ?the point where quite a few have pulled ?right back.

Who, not what

I have for a long time made the point that social media is not about bugging for attention. It's about earning attention through creating remarkable content. This is hardly revelatory but I wonder how many firms have sat down, looked at their websites and decided how much of the news that many still think of as a blog is likely to be of interest to their clients? Not many I suspect.

But there is, perhaps, a more fundamental issue. How can you create content, remarkable or otherwise, when you don't know the first thing about your buyer persona? A buyer persona is defined as the persona(s) of key buyers of your firm's services. A buyer persona includes demographic, firmographic, psychological and behavioural components of a buyer. In the past, you didn't need to worry about attracting the right clients. They just rolled on up. But, nowadays, with the increasing pressure on the market, it's essential that you stop to think who it is you are trying to reach out and connect with. Even the vanilla category of 'private client' has a multiple of buyer personas.

The thing is that most firms are ignoring this issue either because they think it too obvious to not warrant attention or they can't be bothered. But buyer personas don't just provide a gateway to social media. They inform who you should act for, who you shouldn't act for (yes there is such a thing as 'dud' clients), how to attract new clients and how to differentiate the firm. The thing is you already have a welter of intelligence, albeit that a lot of it will be swimming around inside a few heads. But if you can extract the internal intelligence then you will have more than the odd insight to go on. Don't think of this as one of those blue sky thinking exercises. It's a very practical one. In short, what do your clients like/dislike? Write it down. Discuss it. And agree what you need to do to provide more of one - marketing in its broadest sense - and less of the other.

But back to the social media plot. Assuming that you nail the buyer persona issue, make sure you define your overall business goals. It's critical that you dust down the business plan and look to see where all the marketing guff fits with your social media endeavours. Advertising spend. Do you need it? Surely, your focus should be on a blog or two?

Keep it simple

But a plan without support is pretty pointless. You need to win over more than a few messianic supporters. You need to spend time on the internal critics. I'm not suggesting that you go into beat-them-round-head overdrive, but just taking your time to explain the basics of Twitter and the website would be an excellent start. Remember, just because they don't want to go fishing in the pond, doesn't mean they want to take away your rod.

It goes without saying that you need some governance and guidelines. This isn't a case of producing the usual lame stuff, but offering something with a success road map. The sort of thing that shows best practice as well as the pitfalls.

The final issue is that while it's tempting to always be up with the latest fad, whether it's Instagram's 15 second videos or Vine, you would be far better off spending time creating a team of people to blog. At the end of the day, you don't own these platforms. Going back to the buyer persona point, it's pointless producing a slew of content for a platform that only 0.1 per cent of your clients have any connection with.

The success factors of social media are a moving feast. But the success stories will only come when everyone embraces the paradigm, and that means treating social media as something part of the practice, and not remote from it.