What are social media trends?
Social media trends represent topics or ideas that are popular and feature regularly within social media discourse and /or content, or what multiple (typically hundreds or thousands) of users are simultaneously discussing online within a short timeframe. A good example could be a trending Twitter hashtag, a big news story or legislation change or a seasonal holiday. In essence, they’re anything that gets people talking and starts a broad online conversation.
To grow your social media channels, it’s important to identify social media trends for marketing, competitive advantage, and your law firm’s wider business objectives.
How to stay on top of social media trends
There are many ways to plan for and keep up with social media trends. You don’t have to get involved with everything, but using a couple of our suggested methods below will help your law firm to cover all bases and utilise relevant opportunities
So, what are our recommendations for staying up to date with trends on social media?
Use a social media calendar
Social media calendars are a great way to plan out your content, and this will help your firm to track trends, too. You can use a social media calendar to map out awareness days that are particularly relevant to your firm and the work you do, holidays that are applicable to the law sector, and use data to determine where peaks and troughs in service levels are.
Set up Google Alerts on specific words or phrases
By setting up Google Alerts around the areas of law your firm specialises in and topics within them, you can get notified if these start trending.
Google Alerts Setup is just as simple as searching on Google.
- Go to Google Alerts @ https://www.google.com/alerts
- Type in the keywords you want to monitor
- If you are not already signed into your Google Account, enter the email where you’d like to receive the Google Notifications
If you are already signed into Google, it will automatically fill this in with your Google email address. If you would like to send the notifications to a different email address, you will need to sign out from your Google Account first.
However, be aware that you will need a Google Account to set up an alert. If you put a non-Google email address into this field, you will be prompted to either sign in or create a new Google account once you are finished creating the alert.
Join groups on LinkedIn
LinkedIn groups are a good way to stay up to date with trends relevant to your law firm, it could be a local group, a group specific to an area of law your firm specialises in or a digital marketing group that keeps up to date with marketing trends your firm could consider.
Keep up to date with the news
Chances are, if you’re a lawyer or marketer working in the legal sector, you’ll have a natural interest in what’s going on in the world of law. Staying abreast of the news is one of the simplest ways to stay in the loop. National and local news are great ways to stay up to date with what’s going on.
Follow legal influencers
Legal influencers are the first to hop on trends, so stay up to date with any industry influencers.
Sign up to newsletters
Legal and marketing newsletters can help you stay on top of updates, what’s important about them and how they might be relevant to your clients.
Scroll through social media in the morning
As much as we love to hate it, social media is a great place to see what’s going on. Try to set aside 15 – 20 minutes every day to scroll through your firm’s social media feeds. This is a great way to see what people are talking about, what’s trending today, and what changes are happening. Social media platforms have tools to help you set up your feeds, so you see the information you want.
Use Google Trends
Google Trends is the best way to monitor trending topics by using analysing search data, Google Trends will give you a more comprehensive picture of what is trending than data from just one social network, and this can help you make more informed decisions on what you promote, engage with, and follow.
What are the benefits to a law firm of tracking social media trends?
There are many benefits of jumping on social media trends, including:
- You reach large audiences
- You build your law firm’s brand
- You can drive traffic to your website
- You can utilise a variety of trends including showing off your firm’s experience and expertise
- You can educate yourself
- You can generate leads directly and indirectly.
Upcoming Autumn social media trends your law firm can add to its content calendar
Now you know what social media trends are and the many benefits of using them, we’ve put together a list of social media trends and awareness days for Autumn that can be made relevant to law firms.
National Work Life Week & World Mental Health Day
This is a great place to start. Taking place from 10-14 October you can put a campaign in place that showcases the reasons that set your firm apart from other firms, and why law firm students would want to work at your firm.
World Mental Health Day is coming up on Monday 10 October. Full details can be found at https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/our-work/public-engagement/world-mental-health-day
You could show off your values and culture, interview members of your firm from all levels and get them to describe why they love working at your firm, give tours of your office and working from home policies, and show pictures and videos of employees taking part in charity work or the local community.
Chocolate Week
At Conscious, we love sending out orange care packages – have you received one? In these, you’ll find orange chocolate that you didn’t even know existed. Is there anything similar your firm can do to show clients their appreciation and relate it to chocolate week? Chocolate week takes place from 14-19 October.
National Mentoring Day
This is another great way to promote your firm over competitor firms to potential employees. You could talk about how your firm’s vacation and trainee schemes work and how your leadership teams mentor people
Halloween
Halloween is another great way you can jazz up your firm’s website, social media, and blog post topics. Whether you want to compare pumpkins to divorces, add some bats to your website or show off a pumpkin carving competition on your socials – there’s lots of ways you can use Halloween to make your law firm more personable, whilst offering useful and valuable advice.
Start thinking about Christmas
You’ll hate us for mentioning the “C” word in September but it’s much better to start planning your marketing now. There are only 110 days left until Christmas after all.
Whether you want to add some snow to your homepage, have some Christmassy social media templates designed, put a Christmas hat on your logo or something completely out of the (gift) box, we’re here to help.
There are so many trends you can utilise, so why doesn't your law firm?
if your firm isn’t currently on social media or doesn’t have the time to implement a social media strategy, or your website isn’t up to scratch and can’t support these gimmicks, give us a call on 0117 325 0200 or email sales@conscious.co.uk to discuss your firm’s digital marketing needs.