Many law firms have a LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profile and the savvy firms are actually publishing some great content and engaging with audiences of prospects and referral sources.  When someone Googles your firm, those social media sites are likely to be among the first results that pop up.

But remember, people buy from people they know, like and trust.  So it’s even likelier that instead of Googling the name of your firm, they could be searching under one of your attorney’s names or another person at your firm.

And that brings us to an often overlooked social media marketing tool: your employees!

No matter what the roles of the people at your firm, all employees should be mindful of how they are representing your firm online.  While you can’t really dictate what they should put on their profiles, you can encourage them to:

Create quality profiles.  Hopefully your employees are proud of where they work, so letting them know how they can help the firm by maintaining a high quality profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks makes sense.  Offer them consistent language to use in their profiles that reflect your firm’s branding strategy, and ask them to include links to your firm website and blog.  Have them post professional photos, especially on LinkedIn.

Share valuable content.  You and your employees should always be engaging your connections with valuable content, whether that is a position paper from your firm or something relevant to your clients and prospects from a third party source. 

Keep building your networks.  When you take on a new client, ask to connect with them online.  Do the same with referral sources and prospects, but be sure you actually know them.  Relevance matters when it comes to your connections, even more than size.