Top Tips To Help Your Law Firm Grow Using TikTok

Marketing your law firm successfully in a crowded online marketplace is a challenge most firms are being faced with. Especially, with so many different social media channels available, it can get tricky to identify what works for your brand. One way to make your mark is to test the waters on an emerging social media site like TikTok, where you can be among the first in your industry to build a loyal following and, in turn, gather new business leads.

Curious to add TikTok to your marketing mix but don’t know how to get started? We handpicked tips shared by TikTok experts Alex Su (Head of Community at Ironclad), Taly Goody (Goody Law Group), Jacob Sapochnick (Sapochnick Law Firm), and Niki Black (Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase), who moderated our webinar, “Top Ways to Leverage TikTok for Your Law Firm.”

Tip #1: Post often and stay consistent

Jacob: The soft spot is to post three to six times a day when you start. You want to give the algorithm a little bit of flavor to understand who you are and why your account is important for their audience. You should probably do that for 30 days.

Taly: I didn’t post that often, but I agree it’s all about being consistent and posting as much as you can when you first get out there. But you can’t really go in there with the mindset of “this is exactly what I’m going to post”, because it might not work. It’s good to be open-minded.

Tip #2: Find your niche and style

Alex: Focusing on a niche, such as sticking to content around a particular type of law, not only helps you generate engagement but is also really helpful for a business purpose. For example, Ironclad has technology that helps with the contracting process for corporate legal departments, so one of the core content pieces I always put out are jokes about the tension between business teams and corporate legal departments.

Taly: It’s really about finding out what your style is. For me, what I found works the best is more motivational and relatable content, including things that people can relate to, along with educational videos. The most important thing is to just put out as much as you can in different formats, so you can figure out what is your best style.

Tip #3: Choose content for your target audience

Alex: Someone asked what type of content to put out. I think it really comes down to the audience you’re targeting because those folks will have certain types of topics that get them really fired up or really engaged, and you want to stay around those areas.

Jacob: The easiest way to choose content at first is to ask yourself what the top 20 questions your clients ask every single time – just like what you post on your website. From those 20 questions, you can create something educational or funny.

Tip #4: Follow trends

Taly: Scrolling through the FYP (“For You” page) gives me ideas because you can work off of trends. You see a trend, and then tailor it to your practice area.

Jacob: If you’re active on Twitter, for example, you’ll see different trends. If you follow a trend, you will have more chances for your videos to be found, so what I do when I see a trend is I try to adapt it to my own practice. For example, let’s say there was a trend about a particular song. I’ll figure out how it works for my practice. It can be a 15 second sound where something is looping and you don’t say a word you’re just looking in the camera and then you add a caption.

Tip #5: Interact with (and listen to) your followers

Taly: When you post content that people are really into, you’ll actually get more ideas by reading the comments.

Jacob: TikTok allows you to respond to questions through a video. There’s an account of a family attorney in New York and all he does is respond to questions from the audience about how to get divorced or something like that. He’ll respond to the questions on a video, and that’s his content.

Tip #6: Create videos, but don’t overthink it

Taly: I dedicate half a day, usually on the weekend, where I will film maybe once a week or once every other week. I’ll list the videos I want to film. For example, on a particular day, I keep all outfit changes and then I’ll film videos one after the other – boom boom boom – so it doesn’t take me that long. For the actual editing portion where I’m adding text to the video – I won’t do that until I start posting throughout the week.

Alex: I’ve put lots of time into videos that went nowhere and for others, I threw something together and it went viral. I think the hidden lesson is that you don’t always know what’s going to resonate with your audience. And, at the end of the day, the algorithm has a mind of its own.

Tip #7: Be wary of pitfalls, ethical or otherwise

Taly: When I post I definitely make sure I write in the caption or in a hashtag that it is not legal advice and is legal information. If you want to make sure there aren’t going to be any issues, that’s the best kind of approach.

Niki: In terms of usage of swear words in background songs, there are actually TikTok creators who rework songs and remove those words from them. So if you truly want to hop onto a specific trend but are concerned about the language in a song, you can find one of those creators.

Tip #8: Don’t let negative comments slow you down

Taly: Sometimes, there are negative comments on your post. It’s important not to take things personally when people write mean comments. It happens to everybody so just ignore them.

Tip #9: Reap the benefits

Jacob: One way we monetize TikTok is by sending people to book paid consultations. People book them from the link in my TikTok bio, and it has been so popular that I’ve literally been booked out months ahead. And so from those consultations, we’ve been able to convert leads to actual clients – with zero money spent on marketing.

Alex: I probably generate half a million in the sales pipeline every month, and a good number of those get converted to closed deals for Ironclad.

Taly: For my personal injury clients, I’m getting cases and a lot of inquiries from all over America, sometimes even Canada. I actually just settled a case I got from TikTok and got very good results for my client.

With these tips, you’re now equipped to thrive in the TikTok universe. For more useful nuggets of information, tune in to the full webinar here.