The Complete Guide to Social Media for Lawyers

Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools for law firms in the digital age. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have millions of users who spend an average of two and a half hours every day scrolling through their feeds.

These platforms present amazing opportunities to drive more organic traffic to your website and build a great brand reputation in addition to attorney SEO. But where do you start with social media for lawyers?

Below, we dive into the top social media networks and walk you through a step-by-step guide to social media for law firms.

Why Embrace Social Media Marketing for Law Firms?

Why Embrace Social Media Marketing for Law Firms?

A strong social media presence can have significant benefits for law firms of all sizes. From connecting with your future clients to improving your SEO, social media offers many opportunities for growth.

Social Media Helps You Find New Clients

Your online presence is key to helping potential clients find you when they need a lawyer. 

About 66 percent of legal clients do research online before hiring a lawyer. And 31 percent of lawyers acquire new clients through social media platforms.

That means that you need to have a strong online presence so those prospective clients can easily find you.

Social media gives your law firm another foothold in the digital market and can help you attract potential clients.

Social Media Helps You Become a Trusted Brand

Through your social media posts, you can establish your expertise in your field and humanize your law firm. 

You can also use these channels to share news in the legal industry, as well as key information that might interest your target audience. And when you post about your attorneys, you put a face to your law firm.

This expertise and humanization builds trust in your potential clients and may make them more likely to call you when they need legal services.

Social Media Is a Place to Engage with the Community

Social media is all about conversation. You aren’t just posting content and hoping that prospective clients will take it in. 

Rather, you’re taking part in a wider conversation in your community. You can improve brand awareness in your area as you grow your local community involvement on social media.

Social media also offers fantastic opportunities to connect with other legal professionals in your practice area. This kind of professional networking can be great for collecting referrals and staying up to date on legal trends.

Social Media Can Improve Your SEO

You might be surprised to learn that social media can make your SEO efforts more effective.

When you post new content on your law firm website, you can promote it on your social media accounts. This helps to direct more organic traffic back to your website.

These posts can also increase the chances that another website will link back to yours. Traffic and quality backlinks are two of the many factors Google uses to rank search engine results.

You can also engage with your followers, which signals to Google that you’re a valuable resource. Along with a solid SEO strategy, these efforts can give your website a significant boost in search engine rankings.

Best Social Media Platforms for Law Firms

Best Social Media Platforms for Law Firms

Law firms have a lot of social media platforms to choose from. Your time and marketing dollars are not unlimited, so it’s critical to choose the right networks for your needs.

Below we review some of the most popular social media platforms for lawyers.

Facebook

Facebook for Lawyers

Facebook remains the most popular social media network, with over 3 billion active users.

More than half of law firms already maintain professional Facebook pages. If you don’t have a business page on the platform, you’re losing a lot of your market to your competitors.

You can create a detailed profile for your law firm on Facebook. This can include your hours, contact information, and even reviews from previous clients.

Facebook is well-suited to a wide variety of post formats. These include long-form text posts, infographics, pictures, and videos. 

Instagram

Instagram for Lawyers

Instagram is the second-largest of the Meta social networks and hosts image and video content. The platform has more than 2 billion active users and is a great place to put a face to your law firm’s name.

You can share pictures and videos of your attorneys, behind-the-scenes looks at your law firm, and more. Instagram is also well-suited to infographics and other visual media that your followers can absorb quickly.

Instagram also relies heavily on a hashtag system that can help your posts connect with interested non-followers.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn for Lawyers

Although Facebook is more popular among the general population, LinkedIn remains the most popular platform for lawyers. LinkedIn specializes in connecting professionals, which makes it a popular tool for getting referrals.

The tone on LinkedIn is much more professional than on other platforms, which lawyers are often more comfortable with. 

LinkedIn is the perfect platform for longer, more in-depth text posts. You may post stories about recent verdicts, articles about how to handle various legal matters, and so on.

TikTok

TikTok for Lawyers

This short-form video platform has over 1.5 billion active users and has become extremely popular for lawyers. In fact, TikTok is the most-visited online domain in the world. 

This means that TikTok can be a fantastic place to promote your law firm and engage with your followers. This is an especially good option for lawyers who like to show off their personality on video.

TikTok is a great place to engage with trends and play with different types of content. Discuss the legal statutes that apply to kids’ movies, answer current hot-topic legal issues, and have fun with your content.

YouTube

YouTube for Lawyers

YouTube is the second-most popular social media platform, with close to 3 billion users. 

The platform built its reputation on long-form video content, and it still dominates that market. But more recently, they’ve also introduced Shorts, a short-form structure designed to compete with TikTok.

YouTube is a great platform for discussing more complicated topics or showing off your attorneys’ personalities. You can also repurpose these longer videos for content on your other lawyer social media channels.

X (Twitter)

X for Lawyers

X, formerly known as Twitter, is a less popular platform for law firms. But it can still be a good addition to your digital marketing.

This network focuses on short-form text content, with posts limited to 280 characters. You can post photos, links, and other such media as well.

X encourages rapid-fire, live updates, making it a great platform for sharing relevant headlines with your followers. 

Link to news articles about recent verdicts or share local statute changes that impact your client base. You can also post short statistics or quotes from recent victories.

Threads

Threads for Lawyers

Threads is Meta’s response to X (Twitter) and follows the same micro-blogging format. The primary difference is the content length limits on each platform.

Threads allows twice as much text as X does, with posts limited to 500 characters. The platform is also better suited to longer videos.

Bluesky

Bluesky for Lawyers

Like Threads, Bluesky is a direct reaction to X (particularly to the political controversy of 2025). As more left-leaning users looked for alternatives to Elon Musk-owned X and Mark Zuckerberg-owned Threads, Bluesky rose to prominence.

As of this writing, Bluesky has 33 million users – a relatively miniscule user base compared to giants like Facebook. But this platform can still be a good addition to your strategy depending on your target customer base. 

For instance, if you’re a civil rights lawyer, many of your potential clients may be on Bluesky instead of X or Threads.

How to Start Marketing Your Law Firm on Social Media

How to Start Marketing Your Law Firm on Social Media

Social media marketing can present a number of challenges, and many law firms run into the same pitfalls. The steps we lay out here can help you avoid these mistakes and improve your chances of success.

Learn the Rules

Learn the Social Media Rules for Attorneys

As a lawyer, you must maintain professionalism and ethical standards in everything you do, including your social media efforts. The American Bar Association sets specific professional conduct guidelines for attorneys, and many of these pertain to social media.

These guidelines include

  • You must maintain client confidentiality and cannot post about your clients without their permission.
  • Your posts cannot contain information about your cases.
  • You cannot state or imply that you are an expert or specialist unless you have appropriate certification. 
  • You may not use words like “best” or “cheapest” to describe your law firm; instead, use language such as “top-rated” or “award-winning”.
  • Your posts cannot exaggerate any of your achievements or results.

You should also never give legal advice on social media channels, and you must follow all solicitation guidelines. 

Identify Your Goals

Before you launch your lawyer social media, you need to set clear goals. These will help you determine if those efforts are giving you a solid return on your investment.

You may want to consider using the SMART goal model as you lay out these aims.

Identify Your SMART Goals

SMART goals are 

  • Specific – Rather than making it a goal to “post more”, aim to post, for example, three times a week or every day.
  • Measurable – Your goal should be easy to measure so you can track progress toward it. “Get more engagement” isn’t measurable. “Increase the number of comments on posts” is a much better goal.
  • Attainable – While it’s easy to get excited and set pie-in-the-sky goals, that only sets you up for failure. Instead of trying to get 2,000 impressions per post in a single month, aim for 200 impressions.
  • Relevant – You need to make sure your goals actually move you toward your ultimate priority. For instance, if your law firm’s overarching aim is to get more calls, increasing your follower count may be a relevant goal.
  • Timely – It’s important to set time limits on your goal so you can make sure you’re making reasonable progress. Gaining five followers in a week is good; gaining five followers in a year isn’t.

This approach to setting goals can help you make manageable, meaningful progress toward your larger goals.

Research Your Competitors

Often, social media marketing can feel like shooting in the dark. How do you know what will connect with your audience and what platforms you should be focusing on?

The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel – you can just look at what other law firms are doing.

Find and follow your top competitors’ social accounts. Look at which of their posts get the most interaction, what they post the most often, and which platforms they’re most active on.

Use this information as a starting point for your own marketing efforts, but be careful not to end up with a carbon copy account. As we’ll discuss more later, unoriginality is the enemy of social media success.

Research Your Ideal Client

With any marketing plan, it’s essential to have a strong understanding of your target audience. 

Developing a target customer profile with detailed demographics is a great step. But that data won’t be enough to help you build successful lawyer social media accounts. 

You also want to know things like

  • The specific need that brings a client to your law firm. You may have different target markets depending on the services each client needs. For instance, a family lawyer may need different content to connect with adoption clients vs. with divorce clients. 
  • The pain points your target audience is dealing with. What do they struggle with, and what information are they looking for? How can your firm help solve those challenges? 
  • The qualities they want from their lawyer. For example, do you focus more on client support or on an aggressive legal stance? Your content should reflect that tone.

The better you understand your audience, the better you can craft content to meet the needs of that audience.

Pick the Best Social Platforms for Your Law Firm

Pick the Best Social Platform for Your Law Firm

Trying to launch into every social media platform all at the same time is a recipe for failure. Instead, you should pick a few social platforms to focus on at first and expand later.

A few questions may be helpful to ask when selecting your networks.

  • Which social networks does your target customer use most often?
  • How much budget can you dedicate to social media marketing efforts?
  • How much time do you have to spend on content creation? 
  • What kind of content best fits your target audience and your personal strengths?

Even once you’ve decided which platforms you want to concentrate on, remember to stay flexible. 

If you find that one of your selected platforms isn’t getting good results for you, reevaluate. If you’ve given that platform adequate time and resources, try a different option instead.

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Law Firms

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Law Firms

With your initial research in place, it will be time to lay out a strategy for your social media marketing.

Start Small

We touched on this earlier, but it’s unwise to dive in on all the social media platforms at once. 

For one thing, social media marketing is a learned skill. It can take some time to master both a specific content type and the art of using a particular social platform.

And while you’re still learning, you’ll spend time and resources that don’t bring a strong return on that investment.

If you immediately launch multiple social media accounts, it’ will take you longer to master all those techniques. And in the meantime, you’ll be losing time and budget on marketing efforts that don’t bring you a return.

Worse still, spreading yourself this thin increases the risk that you’ll overlook a potential ethics violation. Even if you try to handle all your social media personally (a full-time endeavor on its own), something may slip through the cracks.

Position Yourself as an Expert (But Keep It Simple)

As a lawyer, you likely use a great deal of legal jargon in everyday conversation. And while this language makes perfect sense to you and others in your field, it might not make sense to the average reader. 

Using legalese too often makes your followers more likely to skim past your content.

Instead, keep your content simple and aim to make it understandable for the average reader. Keep in mind that, as a rule, social media content is short. 

Your reader should be able to absorb it quickly. While it can certainly link to longer-form content, you don’t want to overwhelm your readers.

Embrace Authenticity

Embrace Authenticity

One of the best things you can do to grow a loyal social media following is to embrace authenticity.

Today’s users see dozens of sales pitches on their feeds every single day. This has made them extremely attuned to (and intolerant of) accounts that are trying too hard.

As you plan your social media strategy, remember to embrace authenticity. Keep your focus on creating engaging content that will provide value to your followers.

Effective content for law firms includes educational posts, legal tips, and insights that resonate with target audiences.

And remember, people want to connect with people, so allow yourself to get a little personal. Post about your day-to-day work, let people get to know you, and let your personality shine.

Tailor Your Content to Each Social Network

You need diverse content that will speak to the different needs of your target audience. 

This means covering a range of relevant topics, as well as using a variety of media styles. Include:

  • Text-based content – Readers are often more likely to skim over text-based content. In general, social media text content should be short and snappy. (LinkedIn is the notable exception to this rule.)
  • Images and infographics – Pictures are much easier to absorb quickly and often get higher engagement on social media. Look for ways to summarize your content with pictures and infographics. 
  • Video content – Video is the gold standard for most social media content. Short-form video content, in particular, is tremendously popular at this time. In fact, 81 percent of social media users requested more of that content in 2025.

A diverse content roster doesn’t mean that you should be inconsistent. Your followers should know what type of content to expect from you. 

Maintain the same brand voice throughout your content, and be sure to post on a consistent schedule.

Launching Social Media Marketing for Lawyers

Launching Social Media Marketing for Lawyers

Now that you have a solid strategy for your social media, it’s time to put your plan into action! 

Set a Social Media Schedule

Setting a social media schedule is critical to implementing a successful marketing strategy. Posting consistently keeps you at the forefront of your followers’ minds and helps them build a relationship with your law firm.

Best practices for how frequently to post vary from platform to platform. In general, experts advise posting to

  • Facebook at least once a day
  • Instagram at least three times a week
  • LinkedIn at least once a day
  • TikTok at least three times a week
  • YouTube at least once a week
  • X (Twitter) at least twice a day
  • Threads at least twice a day
  • Bluesky at least twice a day

You may also want to do research on when your potential clients are most active and plan your posting schedule accordingly.

Best Social Media Marketing Tools

Best Social Media Marketing Tools

If this schedule sounds overwhelming, there are several social media tools that can make this process more manageable.

  • Hootsuite – Hootsuite is a powerful one-stop social media management tool. In addition to making it simple to schedule posts, Hootsuite offers in-depth analytic tools. You can get valuable insights into how your posts are performing and even respond to private messages and comments.
  • Sprout Social – Sprout Social is a solid alternative to tools like Hootsuite. They offer the same sort of all-in-one social media management, as well as powerful scheduling capabilities. Sprout even has functionality that allows you to schedule Instagram collaboration posts and Facebook reels. Since these posts are usually impossible to schedule, even on the platforms themselves, this feature is incredibly useful.
  • Later – Later offers many of the same scheduling and social listening tools as their competitors. But their best functionality is the link in bio tool they offer. This feature allows you to connect hyperlinks to individual posts on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Mention and Keyhole can also be helpful social media tools for monitoring your online reputation and strengthening your marketing.

Interact with Your Followers

Social media is all about interaction. Today’s consumers expect a personal touch and connection from the brands they interact with most often. 

When you interact with your followers, you create a deeper relationship between your law firm’s brand and your audience. This can help deepen their sense of trust.

React to comments, carry on conversations, and answer readers’ questions. This simple investment in your social media presence can go a long way toward improving your online reputation.

Maintaining Your Law Firm Social Media Marketing

Maintaining Your Law Firm Social Media Marketing

Now that you have your lawyer social media accounts launched, you need to establish a sustainable maintenance strategy.

Create Social Media Policies and Get Your Team Involved

Handling social media is a daunting task for one person to take on alone, so it can be helpful to get your team involved. But you’ll need a defined set of social media policies to ensure your messaging stays consistent.

Set out guidelines for who may to post on social media and what approvals they need to get. You may also want to establish a brand tone that will remain familiar to your followers no matter what platform they’re using.

Measure Your Law Firm Social Media Marketing Results

Now that your lawyer social media is up and running, you’ll need to track the results of these efforts. Without social media analytics, you have no way to know what’s resonating with your audience. 

You may want to track a variety of key performance indicators, including

  • Reach
  • Engagement
  • Click-through rate
  • Follower growth

Adjust your social media and overall marketing strategy based on the results you see in these reports.

Consider Paid Social Media Advertising

Of course, one of the best ways to boost your social media presence is with paid advertisements. Social media advertising can be incredibly affordable, making it a great option for law firms with a tight budget.

Social media platforms offer variety of ad formats, including

  • Carousels featuring client testimonials
  • Videos answering common legal questions
  • Retargeting campaigns that focus on users who have visited your website in the past
  • Local ads targeted to a specific area around your law office

Social networks also offer a unique opportunity to tailor your ad campaigns. You can limit who sees your ad, selecting for certain ages, genders, geographic areas, and even interests.

Using targeted ads can help you avoid wasting ad spend on people who are unlikely to need your legal services.

How Not to Promote Your Law Firm on Social Media

How Not to Promote Your Law Firm on Social Media

Many law firms make several common mistakes when they dive into social media marketing. 

Ignore Your Audience

One of the quickest ways to undermine your social media marketing efforts is to ignore your audience.

When your followers take the time to engage with your posts, it shows that they value your content and your brand. This is a fantastic opportunity to build on that connection and win their loyalty.

But if you ignore those comments, you show your followers that you don’t value them, which alienates your audience. Worse yet, if you ignore messages, you could be losing opportunities to sign new cases.

Always respond to comments and messages from legitimate users (engagement from troll accounts is another matter).

Pack Your Feed with Sales Pitches

One of the most common mistakes law firms make on social media is packing their feed with nothing but sales pitches and CTAs. 

While social media can be a great way to drive engagement, your focus should be on providing valuable content. People want to follow accounts that make their feed more interesting, informative, or entertaining.

As a rule, only 20 percent of lawyer social media posts should contain a promotion or call to action.

Share Unoriginal or Inauthentic Content

Today’s social media users live in a constant barrage of ads, sales pitches, and brands vying for their attention. This means that they’ve developed a sharp eye and a low tolerance for unoriginal and inauthentic content.

Avoid making content that doesn’t reflect your personality; it will only alienate your followers. Instead, develop a strategy and a content style that plays to your strengths.

You should also avoid only posting repackaged imitations of your competitors’ content. After all, if you don’t post anything original, why should people follow you instead of the accounts that are?

Get the Most Out of Your Law Firm Social Media Marketing

Social media for lawyers is a great way to get the word out about your brand, connect with a wider potential audience, and more. Choosing the right social media platform is important, as is maintaining a consistent posting schedule. 

If you’re looking for more ways to grow your firm, LawRank wants to help. We provide legal marketing that works, including SEO, PPC, web design, lawyer social media management, and more. Reach out to us today to start getting honesty, transparency, and results from your marketing agency.