Planning a marketing strategy in 2024 almost guarantees the use of social media. Although ever-changing, platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook offer unmatched potential for your law firm’s audience reach, customer engagement, and brand awareness. To take full advantage of these properties, it’s crucial to start monitoring what strategies are working and which aren’t. The easiest and most accurate way to do this is through the tracking of KPIs as part of your regular law firm digital PR practices.

What Are KPIs?

KPIs, or key performance indicators, measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in a quantifiable way. You are probably already aware of some social media KPIs—metrics like user comments, post likes, and account followers that you mentally track on your own personal account. When tracked for your firm’s business account however, your team can utilize KPIs to hone in on its digital strategy, leading to more customer leads and a better, more consistent ROI.

What KPIs Should I Track?

Choosing how many and which KPIs to track is completely dependent upon your law firm’s goals. Generally, most businesses will want to focus on metrics that contribute to visibility, engagement, and customer conversion and satisfaction. This ensures your content is reaching the right people, and converting them into customers. Tracking KPIs that fit into each of these categories will cover the full scope of your firm’s social media efforts.

Visibility

KPIs that track visibility share how many times your social post has been displayed to users. This allows your team to learn how far your content is reaching, and better understand your audience. Common KPIs to track visibility include:

1. Followers: This is the number of accounts following your social channel at a specific time. While not necessary for success, generally the greater number of followers you have, the more people who will be viewing your content (and the higher chance you have of reaching a future customer).

2. Reach: The reach metric shares how many unique people viewed your content. This doesn’t just get restricted to your followers; accounts that looked at your post but aren’t following you are still tracked with reach. This, combined with your follower count, are particularly useful for seeing the growth of your firm’s social account over time.

Engagement

Engagement tracks how users are interacting with your content, and the quality of those interactions. These metrics are ideal for understanding what content is resonating the most with your audience. As for KPIs that will track engagement, we recommend the following:

1. Reactions: Every time someone ‘likes’ your photo on Instagram or ‘loves’ your video on Facebook, it registers as a reaction. Each social media platform has a slightly different name for their reactions, but they all communicate the same thing: users’ positive or negative feelings about your content. This KPI provides a simple way to gauge how your post was received by the audience.

2. Shares: Whether sending to a friend or reposting to their own account, users who share your content are helping increase the visibility of your firm’s profile with a single engagement. There are many reasons someone might share your post, but often this is a good sign that the user found it useful or educational, and wanted to spread the word. Track your shares to understand what content is the most impactful to your audience.

3. Comments: This KPI is similar to reactions, in that comments can be either positive or negative. However you get a lot more context with this type of engagement. Instead of just “liking” a post, users can add their feedback directly under your post with a public comment, sharing what exactly about the content they enjoyed the most. Tracking the amount of comments each of your posts gets, and diving into those comments to read what people are saying, is another great way to determine what kind of content gets the best reception. Not only that, but on a platform like LinkedIn, this gives your law firm and its attorneys the opportunity to connect with potential clients and engage in relevant conversations.

Customer Conversion and Satisfaction

Your ultimate goal with social media is to attract, educate, and attain potential customers, so utilizing KPIs to track your customer conversions and satisfaction is crucial. To know if your content has been successful, with a powerful message and encouraging call to action, you can track the following KPIs:

1. Conversions: With every post you make, a call to action (CTA) should be included that directs the user to one of your firm’s resources. Often this includes a link to a recent blog post or service page that expands on the topic mentioned in your social media post. In social media, every time a user capitalizes on your CTA, it is considered a conversion, or a transformation of a regular viewer into an actual potential customer. You can track your social media conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions (or clicks on your CTA link) by the total number of viewers your post received.

2. Reviews: Reviews are the most direct way of learning a customer’s thoughts on your services and content. Social channels like Google Business Profiles and Facebook offer users the chance to share text and a rating, as well as any applicable images, of their experience with your firm. Tracking your reviews will allow your team to get a clear idea of what’s working and what isn’t, directly from the customer’s mouth.

How Do I Track KPIs?

Knowing what KPIs to track is great, but knowing how to track them is what really helps push your firm ahead of the competition. Luckily, most of these metrics, such as followers, shares, and comments, are accessible with a business account with your social media platforms. You can find these KPIs in the Insights section of your business profiles, and often the tracking is done for you by the app itself. This is a great option for firm’s with just a single account to manage, as the data is easy to digest and access.

There is also the option to utilize a third-party analytics tool. These often will provide more in-depth insights, with tracking results that span a longer period of time than some social media business profiles can offer.

However, if your team would like to stick with the legal work, relying on a marketing firm that specializes in digital might be the best choice for you. Contact us today to learn more about how our law firm digital PR and SEO services can ease your social media marketing campaign, from brainstorming new content to tracking and compiling metrics.