Pros and cons of social media scheduling tools
Growing your brand on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can help you reach new people and solidify your relationships with existing customers. However, managing your law firm’s social media presence is time-consuming and let’s face it, often frustrating.
With a record 3.96 billion people using social media(worldwide) and spending an average of 147 minutes on social media platforms a day, you simply can’t afford to miss out on this opportunity.
The good news is that numerous social media scheduling tools have been developed to help you keep on top of this. These tools enable you to schedule social posts across multiple platforms and accounts. You can schedule posts ahead of time, ensuring a consistent social media presence while allowing your team to stay focused on other tasks.
Some popular social media scheduling tools that law firms (or their digital agencies) are using include:
Each has its own pros and cons. Each has options to schedule to different social media platforms and most allow you to work with the most common platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. Many also have numerous other marketing features aside from social scheduling.
The pros and cons of using social media scheduling software
There are many benefits associated with using social media scheduling tools and also a few drawbacks you need to consider (which we talk about later).
Benefits of social media scheduling tools
Run your social media accounts more efficiently
You won’t need to log in and out of accounts as much anymore. This can be a real time-saver for any business with multiple social media accounts.
Some companies like to have different Twitter handles for various departments of their law firm, such as family law, criminal law, etc. Others like to have a primary Twitter handle and one for customer support and queries. In situations like this, constantly having to switch between accounts can take a lot of time, making social media software a much more efficient option.
Ensure a consistent posting schedule
Consistency is vital when posting on social media. If you post three times a week on Facebook and then disappear for a few weeks, your followers will lose interest. Instead, a balanced and consistent posting schedule is a must. It’s also important to have regular content if you’re using sponsored content (paid ads). Often viewers of your ads will click through to your page to see more about what you’re about.
This can be almost impossible to achieve when posting manually because other tasks get in the way. However, social media tools enable you to set up many of your posts ahead of time.
Refine your social media strategy and publish at the most effective times
The best social media scheduling tools on the market today come with advanced analytics and insights, enabling you to better understand your social media presence.
You can discover which types of posts have the most and least engagement. You can also learn the best days and times to send out a Tweet or LinkedIn or Facebook post. This can help you refine your social media strategy to optimise your engagement rates.
Reach people across the world
For global law firms (and even national), managing their social media presence can be even more challenging, as you have significant time differences to contend with for reaching your various audiences.
With social media automation, you can post a Facebook message or a Twitter poll while you’re fast asleep. This means you have more opportunities to reach a larger audience, and you can use analytics to optimise your efforts for different audience groups based on their location.
Re-use content effectively
Recycling content is an excellent way of driving fresh eyes to your blog posts and legal videos. You can simply re-post a piece of content with a different message or a different image.
Social media scheduling tools make this easy, ensuring you leave sufficient time between every re-post.
Cons of social media scheduling tools
Social media scheduling can feel spammy if not done well
Social media has humanised brands, enabling us to get closer to our favourite businesses. If you are simply posting scheduled tweets, at the same time every week, with no other interaction, it can come across as spammy.
Scheduling too far in advance can result in a lack of relevancy
If you plan posts too far in advance, your content can end up being irrelevant or even worse, insensitive.
You only need to consider the recent Covid-19 pandemic. People lost loved ones and many went into financial hardship. Failing to factor this into the messages you sent out during this period (or scheduled prior to this period) could have led to you posting something inappropriate considering what people were experiencing.
So, while scheduling can be an efficient tool, we would recommend not scheduling too far in advance.
You miss out on the opportunity to engage with your followers live
Interacting with your audience is one of the easiest and quickest ways of building rapport with them. We acknowledge it’s more difficult nowadays with quite a saturated market and further, law firms aren’t necessarily at the top of the ‘follow list’. However, many firms still get solid engagement and even more importantly, messages about their services.
If you pre-schedule your posts and do not interact with people live, you are missing out on the chance to respond to comments, likes, messages and shares, which can give you multiple chances to convert followers into clients.
Mistakes can happen
Finally, when using social media scheduling tools, it is easier to make a mistake if you are not careful.
You could end up posting a message on the wrong account or getting your dates mixed up. Unfortunately, most people do not tend to realise these errors until their messages have gone live.
Should you use social media scheduling tools?
It is clear to see that there are pros and cons associated with social media scheduling tools. While they can be highly beneficial in terms of refining your strategy and ensuring you post content on a consistent basis, you still need to have a live presence so you can interact with your followers and ensure your account feels genuine.
If you’d like to refine your law firm’s social media presence, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the team at Social Hive today.
Contacting Social Hive
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