Recently in Law Firm Marketing Category

With Facebook jumping onboard the hashtag fun alongside Twitter, hashtags are now being used on social media more than ever. This means that if your law firm has an account on Twitter or Facebook (ideally, you should be on both and have a website), this will possibly affect the way your content is viewed and used by your clients as well as other Interner viewers and passerbys.

Nowadays, it's not just another regrettable baby name, or a way for people to crack un-funny personal jokes. Hashtags, (that # sign before certain words in online content) are clickable and a very efficient way for many social networking sites to gauge what's trending and then organize content under their respective topics. For example, if a lot of people are tweeting or posting on Facebook about the #TheElection, you can easily find your way to the whole collection of everyone else who's mentioning it as well.

Before you get too pound-sign happy, though, keep in mind that it's not as easy as it looks. Here are some basics rules about hash-tagging that you may want to know first:

When it comes to marketing your law firm, your website is your online presence. Sure, there's social media and other emerging e-trends that need to be recognized, but it all starts (and sometimes, ends) with your website.

But my firm already has a website, you say. But hold on: Is it up-to-date? Is it interactive? Does it feel like it's representing a firm with people who were born after bathing became a social norm? Here are five suggestions on where your website may need to be given a slight (or major, life-changing) facelift:

I came to an epiphany shortly before graduating law school. I realized that, if I wanted to practice law, my choices would be between working for a bottom-of-the-barrel firm for $35k (in California? yeesh) or starting my own practice. In preparation for this leap, I read about a dozen books on how to run a small firm, from business to marketing to client management. One book gave a tip that I'm only now starting to understand: the around town walk.

Every day, at noon, this guy walks around his small town. He figures that it keeps his face in front of the people, it'll have the opposite effect of "out of sight, out of mind." He may have a point, but if one were to walk around a larger city, like San Francisco or Baltimore, he would be more likely to be accosted by homeless people than to run into potential clients.

The principle remains the same for big cities, however. You just have to find a community in which to shine.

More and more Internet users are accessing websites on their mobile devices. Will they find your law firm on their iPhone or Android phone?

It's very likely that potential clients will be searching for your firm on their phones these days as mobile Internet users increase. So should lawyers keep up with technology and get a mobile website?

Mobile Internet users have grown 30% in one year to about 1.5 billion users worldwide, according to a 2013 Internet trends study reported by TechCrunch. Mobile usage now comprises about 15% of all Internet traffic. So what do these numbers mean for attorneys and law firms?

There's been some criticism of the recently announced purchase of Tumblr by Yahoo. The blogging platform was purchased for about $1.1 billion. Thousands of its users have already been driven away to other blogging platforms from fear that Yahoo will ruin it.

Amidst the controversial Yahoo purchase, Tumblr quickly became the subject of another headline. Only days after the purchase news, Tumblr sent out a mass email to some of its users to update their settings with an embarrassing mistake.

We are lawyers. We are also businesspeople. Often, especially when a big trial or motion is pending, we fall into single-case tunnel vision. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Clients should always come first. After all, you have an ethical obligation to help the client, and only a financial obligation to your business.

If you aren’t careful, however, the business aspects of your small firm can dry up while you are fighting that noble fight over a motion to exclude evidence. Every day, you should be taking at least one small step towards advancing the business side of your firm, from marketing to billing. Here are five ways to do so:

Lawyers who choose to use social media as a marketing strategy should consider it a job just like any other on their list. Facebook is so popular it is ranked number two of the most used app for local searches, just behind Google Maps. If you haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet, there is still time to take advantage of this huge captive audience.

Facebook is great to keep up with friends within your personal life, but having a page for your law firm is a great online legal marketing tool. There are three things you should do to ensure that your Facebook experience is beneficial to your practice:

It’s the American Dream, baby! No, not the unreleased Mike Jones (Who?) album, but the actual dream. Put your work in. Do it better, and cheaper, than the next guy. Grow your business. Reap rewards in proportion to effort expended.

Yesterday, we brought you the take of Bryan Johnson, a manager at Sears turned millionaire start-up credit card processor to the cyber-stars (such as AirBnB, OpenTable, and Uber). He made the change in two years, and author, investor, and entrepreneur James Altucher devised a number of rules based off his interview of the money-processing mogul.

People constantly misspell my name. All three parts of it. So if I wanted to open the Robyn Hagan Cain Law Firm, I wouldn't just buy the domain name robynhagancainlaw.com. I would probably buy domains with common variations of my name -- Robin and Hagen and Kain/Cane/Kane -- and redirect each of those to the primary site, robynhagancainlaw.com.

Why the extra expense and effort for my hypothetical law firm? I just don't want to waste time fighting cybersquatters in court.

Texting may not be the most efficient way to pick up new clients, but it's not explicitly barred under Ohio's legal ethics rules, the ABA Journal reports.

Earlier this month, the Ohio Supreme Court's ethics board announced in a ruling that lawyers may solicit clients by text message as long as they follow the applicable federal and state telemarketing laws, according to the ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct.