Should law firms develop a presence on the social networks? A small minority of individual lawyers actively network on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and perhaps also on Facebook, though the majority are infrequent users of these services. Now law firms themselves are taking tentative steps to establish an official presence.

In the first of a series of short articles on social networking for law firms Jordan Furlong explains below how firms can effectively promote themselves on Facebook.

Like most people, I began using Facebook purely as a social tool, adding friends and family and acquaintances-I-haven’t-seen-since-high-school to my contacts list. About a year or so ago, however, I began getting Facebook connection requests from business contacts, which felt a little odd – Facebook was for people I knew well and with whom I was willing to share updates about kids’ skating lessons, whereas more distant or professional contacts were more appropriate for LinkedIn and Twitter. So I tried to keep my personal and business lives in separate social media spheres, and from my conversations on the topic, I’ve found that many lawyers have tried the same thing.

Those distinctions are rapidly collapsing. Facebook recently passed the 400-million member mark – it would be the world’s third-largest country by population – and that much critical mass means that Facebook is a business tool whether we like it or not. Law firms are coming to this realization as well, and many are dipping a toe in the Facebook waters by setting up a Fan Page, a firm account that provides information about the firm and invites other Facebook members to become “Fans” (a designation that costs nothing and serves to indicate support or appreciation for a given company, product or service).

Unfortunately, most of these firm efforts are so tentative as to deliver very little value, and most seem to indicate a misunderstanding of what Facebook offers that a website doesn’t.

A typical law firm Fan Page merely repeats what the firm already offers on its website, and in much less detail. A short description of the firm taken from the website’s “About” page, a series of links to press releases taken from the “Media” page, and that’s about it: Website Lite, basically. I won’t pick on any firms by linking to their underachieving Facebook Fan Page, but if you search for any given large firm’s presence on Facebook, what you’ll likely find will confirm this.

What Facebook offers firms is the chance to tell a different story about themselves, or show a different side of themselves, than what is possible or appropriate to tell and show through other communication means, such as a website, a newsletter or a brochure. No law firm is really a one-dimensional creature that can be summed up completely by a corporate website – or if it is, it has bigger problems than social media. Most if not all law firms are complex, multi-dimensional communities of service professionals and service offerings, and some of those dimensions are more effectively conveyed through non-traditional vehicles like Facebook.

For instance, a Facebook Fan Page allows a firm to post photos and videos of a staff function, a charity fun run, or a lawyer’s TV appearances. It can let a firm start up discussions of interest to its Fans involving industries or communities that the firm serves. It can showcase upcoming events, either at the firm or in the community (perhaps including events that the firm sponsors). It can incorporate updates from the firm’s Twitter account, if it has one, or point to interesting or important developments in the law or with specific clients. Anything that a firm is or does that could benefit from the interactivity and sense of community that Facebook engenders is a good candidate for inclusion on a Fan Page.

Facebook has only scratched the surface of what it can offer users, so I fully expect that the number and variety of features and functions available to Fan Page owners will increase in the years to come. The important thing to remember isn’t that every firm needs a Facebook page – I don’t think that’s the case – but that firms need to find out what social media vehicles like Facebook offer in terms of new ways of marketing themselves, new means by which the character and brand of the firm can be communicated, and new opportunities to develop a multi-faceted profile in the online world. Your website can’t tell the whole story of your firm, and you don’t need to force it to try – there’s a world of channels opening up to your firm, and now’s the time to experiment and figure out which ones deliver the best results for your marketing, branding and communications goals.

Jordan Furlong is an award-winning blogger who chronicles the extraordinary changes under way in the practice of law at Law21. He is a partner with Edge International, providing consulting services to law firms on strategic planning and tactical matters and a Senior Consultant with Stem Legal.

Email jordan@law21.ca.

Later in this issue David Flint reviews what’s happening with social media in the Scottish legal community.

Further articles in this series will be looking at Twitter and LinkedIn