Social for law firms, where the lawyer is the brand

It builds the familiarity that makes a client pick up the phone, because almost nobody instructs a lawyer on the strength of a single post and almost everybody instructs one whose name and views they have been seeing for a while. It also carries the check, since a client given a name looks that person up.

What it does not do is produce enquiries on a weekly chart. Treating it as a direct response channel is the quickest way to conclude it does not work.

The lawyers, in almost every case, because a legal buyer is choosing a person rather than a logo and a named individual explaining something they deal with every week carries a weight that a company page simply cannot borrow. The firm page still matters, but as the spine rather than the voice.

In practice we write with the lawyer rather than for them, because the posts that work sound like the person. Ghostwriting that does not survives about three weeks.

Less than most expect once it is set up properly, because the useful raw material is already there in the matters they are handling and the developments they are reading about, and the job is turning that into something publishable rather than inventing it. A short conversation usually produces several weeks of material.

What it cannot be is fully delegated. A profile that clearly has nothing to do with the person behind it is worse than an empty one.

Far fewer than most agencies will suggest, because a commercial practice in this market is talking to a professional audience that sits largely on one network, while a firm doing family, property or private client work is reaching people somewhere else entirely. Which one you need follows from the work you want.

We would rather run one channel properly than five thinly. A dormant account on a platform your clients do not use reads worse than no account at all.

It depends on the work rather than on the channel, since English carries the majority of commercial and professional conversation here, while Arabic earns its place quickly for family matters, for private client work and for anything touching government entities. A commercial practice can usually run in English alone.

Our own delivery today is in English. Where Arabic is central to the work we will scope it properly at the outset rather than treat it as a translation task at the end.

In narrow, specific uses rather than as a standing budget, because the audience worth reaching is small and the useful job is putting one clear explanation in front of the people it actually concerns rather than buying reach across a market. Used that way it is efficient.

Used as a follower campaign it is not. We would rather spend a small paid budget amplifying the three posts that worked than boosting everything.

On enquiries, on named searches for your lawyers and on whether the right people are seeing the work, rather than on followers, because a thousand people who will never have a matter you can take is not an audience worth having. The named search number is the one we watch most closely.

It is the clearest sign that a post did its job, because it means somebody went looking for the person afterwards. That is the behaviour this channel exists to cause.