Repurpose content you have : Social media time saver for lawyers
Janine Popick (@janinepopick), CEO and founder of VerticalResponse, an online marketing company, in an article in Inc., writes that a secret to successful social media marketing is to use what you’ve already got. Don’t think you have anything? Think again.
If you’re like most busy business owners, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “I barely have enough time to run my company, now I have to worry about social media?”
Social media can seem overwhelming and daunting, but if you break it down into tiny little pieces, it’s actually quite doable.
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This is what we say to people: You’ve got a ton of great content at your fingertips that you might not think is interesting, but I’ll tell you, your followers do! Your followers follow or like you for a reason. Keeping in front of them could get them talking about you to their friends, and guess what? If they’re a customer, their friends are probably a lot like them, which means potential customers for you. (emphasis added)
Popick is right in sync with LexBlog’s President, Kevin McKeown (@kevinmckeown), who includes leveraging and repurposing your content in more efficient ways as one of his seven big picture points lawyers ought consider in their use of social media.
The law is a content and information rich profession. You receive and consume lots of content to stay on top of your game and stay up to speed with the industries your clients work in. You produce lots of content.
Here’s just a number of ways you can leverage and repurpose your content for blogging and sharing on other social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
- Repurpose the counsel you give an an email or letter, obviously removing all confidential information.
- Repurpose an argument and analysis you made on one point in a brief or memorandum, reducing some of the legalese to a conversational tone.
- Use an RSS Reader, Flipboard, Zite, or Twitter to receive relevant information/content and share with your followers what you’ve read on your blog or other social media. What is interesting to you will be interesting to people in your target audience and attract even more followers. This blog post began by seeing Popick’s article on Flipboard.
- Take a longer article, shorten it, and, if needed, make it more conversational in tone.
- Use your firm’s email alerts, not on their own, but as a starting pointing to engage thought leading bloggers and the mainstream media writing on the issue.
- Write down the questions your clients and prospective clients ask. Answer them, keeping confidential out, in a blog post.
- When leaving comments on other blogs, an excellent way to grow your influence, expand on the comment a bit and repurpose it into a blog post.
When I starting blogging almost nine years ago I’ll confess I didn’t know what this whole world of blogging was all about. Social media was term still years away.
The way I learned about blogging and what was being labeled new media was by consuming content, mostly via an RSS reader. I shared what I read in my blog offering my insight as to what I read and what I read applied to the legal profession. There was no Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Facebook yet.
My followers grew because they liked the role I was playing – an intelligence agent. By consuming content to learn, repurposing the content for my blog, and offering my take on the content my reputation as a reliable authority on the area of business development through blogging, and now social media, grew.
To those of you repurposing content already, what content are you leveraging to save time?