Social Media for Lawyers: Why Branding is Important for Your Law Firm Across Social Media

When it comes to developing your law firm’s online presence, a website isn’t the only platform you should be thinking about. Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide so many opportunities to build and engage your audience.

You might view your website and your social media channels as two very distinct entities, but to your audience, they should be the same. When a visitor comes to your Twitter page, for example, he should not be thinking:

• Did I accidentally land on the wrong Twitter account?
• Why do the visuals look so different from those on the website?
• How come there is no consistency in feel or tone between this Twitter page and the website?

On this last point, the key word we want to highlight is consistency. While you should be curating your content to have a consistent and distinct brand voice, don’t neglect the visuals. This includes everything from your cover photos to your logo. Having similar, if not the same visuals from channel to channel is an effective and crucial way to maintain brand consistency.

How do you figure out what the visuals should be?

Assuming you already have a website and logo, start with these materials. Is there already an image you’re using on the homepage that you can repurpose for your Facebook’s cover photo? We suggest using imagery from the homepage because your online visitor could very well go from one of your social media channels to your website and vice versa, and you want this transition to be as visually seamless as possible. If using homepage imagery is not possible for whatever reason, you want to select an image that is similar in subject matter, composition or color as what they would see on your homepage.

Of course, you also can’t forget about including your logo. The most common way to incorporate it into your social media profile is featuring it as the profile picture. However, the tricky thing is that many of these social media platforms use a square format for their profile picture. That means that for a particularly wide law firm logo, it either won’t fit or be squished if you try to cram it in.

To make your logo look great in this square format, you should do one of the following:

• Rearrange the elements of your logo so that they stack on top of each other or fill up the square somewhat equally in both vertical and horizontal directions
• Isolate a particular element of the logo and feature it alone. This element could be the icon that precedes the text part of your logo. Or if you have a typographic logo instead of an iconographic one, you can take the first letter of your law firm’s name and have that be the symbol of your firm. In the case of a law firm name that features multiple partners, this could mean incorporating all of the initials.

Here is an example of a law firm that applies these practices to their social media page:

And if you take a look at the website, notice how visually consistent it is with their social media page.

Aside from the profile pictures and cover photos, there are opportunities within the posts themselves for visual consistency. Where applicable and helpful, you should accompany a post with an image for increased engagement. The images used for the posts should generally be the same type of image; for example, if you are using vector imagery, stick to that for all of your posts if you can. Having greater visual cohesion among these images makes your page, and in turn, your firm, look organized and polished.

On that note, all of these tips in this post are really ways to help your firm better establish its credibility. Just as you want to be known for being consistent and reliable in person to build trust with your colleagues and clients, you also want your online presence to convey the same idea.