Making Your Professional Law Firm Facebook Page Stand Out From The Crowd
Why does your law firm need a Facebook law firm website? The answer is simple: Facebook has more than 500 million active users, and about half of those users log in daily. Facebook has become a great tool for extending your law firm’s online marketing campaign.
Having a professional Facebook page for your law firm is a good way to brand your law firm in this rapidly growing medium. Facebook now gives your law firm the opportunity to code the page with a fully functional website including graphics, calls to action and even videos.. Imagine that — a fully functioning law firm website within Facebook.
You should be aware that Facebook is making significant updates on March 11, 2011. You can expect several changes that will affect how you create functionality on your Facebook company page. In this post I am going to walk you through the future changes and explain how you can utilize a fully functional and conversion heavy fan page.
Navigation
The biggest change is the location of the main navigation of the page. Facebook decided to take away the tabs at the top of your page and offer navigation on the left sidebar, directly below the profile picture. The tabs in the previous design limited the amount of visible navigation you had at the top of the fan page.
If you utilized applications that added more than seven tabs to the top, some tabs would be hidden from view until a drop down button was clicked. Now that the navigation is located below the profile picture, there is ample room to display all of the tabs associated with your page. The only downside occurs when a company uses a taller graphic as their profile image. This will cause the navigation to move farther down the page, making it harder to find upon first inspection.
Featured Photos
There is a new featured photos section at the top of your page wall. This will display the last 5 images you have uploaded to that page. This is a great feature to get users to interact with your Facebook page. They may skim through your photos when something catches their eye in the featured section.
A Look at Consultwebs’ Facebook Page
On our latest Consultwebs redesign, we utilized some of the latest features with the help of a Facebook app called Static FBML. This program allowed us to create separate tabs on our Facebook page, adding functionality and customized information. With the changes taking effect in March, this app will not be useful for new implementations, although Facebook will continue to support pages already built. In its place you will find iframe functionality, which gives you the ability to create a full website on an external server and access it through your Facebook law firm page.
Before this change, the user was forced to click once to activate the iframe and see the content inside. Now the iframe content will be visible without forcing the user to add a precious click to your conversion process.
You might say, “That is great, but how does it apply to my law firm?” Well, let me give you a real world situation in which someone may be on Facebook already checking in with their family and friends. They come across your name through “word of wall” and visit your company page. You may have a very nice page that is custom designed for Facebook, but it still takes the user to your main site when any of the links are clicked. That one extra step, even though it is a small one, risks losing potential clients. However, with iframes you can build a standalone website that could convert users to clients without leaving Facebook. You’ll be able to create enticing calls to action, contact forms or even personally customized videos targeting Facebook users, all within the confines of Facebook. And the best part of all is that you will be able to track the conversions you received by using Google Analytics..
If we can help you with your law firm Facebook or other social media pages, please let us know at marketing@consultweb.com or 800-872-6590.
Dale Tincher says:
September 7, 2011 at 2:02pmAn article in the New York Times discussed a recent Pew Report that states that more than half of Americans are using Social Networks. The article stated, “The Pew survey found that among adults who are online, the rates of participation were higher: 65 percent, according to the survey, up slightly from 61 percent last year.” Other comments included, “The survey by the center’s Internet and American Life Project described women ages 18 to 29 as “the power users,” with 89 percent of them using social networking sites and 69 percent using them every day. Such a stark finding has obvious implications for advertising on sites like Facebook. Neither income nor education seemed to have any statistically significant bearing on the use of the sites. A separate study published by the Pew Center in June found that black Americans continued to be more likely to be on Twitter than whites” See the entire article at
” http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/half-of-america-is-using-social-networks/