A couple of weeks ago, Facebook announced that it was making changes to its News Feed algorithm that would result in showing more feeds from user’s friends and family members and fewer items from institutional brands.

This is in direct response to Facebook users saying they want to see more content from the people and places they are already connected with, and less from people or companies they don’t know or care about.

What this means for legal marketers is this: if you are currently doing all your posting under your firm’s umbrella, consider making more posts under your own name. That doesn’t mean you should abandon your firm page, especially if you’ve built up a good following. Just consider posting more — or sharing posts from your firm page — under your own name.

I do both, and have been doing so for some time.

Facebook Users Want Information and Entertainment

According to Facebook research, their users want their News Feeds to do two primary things: inform them and entertain them. After all, at its essence, Facebook is a place for you to connect with the people, places and things you care about the most. If it became a place where you were served posts from people or companies you didn’t know, you’d likely leave. And once you become disengaged, Facebook knows it would have a devil of a time getting you back in the fold.

Pay-to-Play Strategy

There’s also the pay-to-play strategy for business pages, a tactic that many companies have used with good results without a big cash outlay. With Facebook ads, you should have a free offer (webinar, ebook, etc.) to promote. Using Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool, you can import your existing contact list into Facebook so you can target your ads to current clients and prospects. You can also create a Custom Audience based on visitors to your website.

Once you have uploaded your contacts, Facebook has additional targeting options so you can target ads by income, zip code, job function, net worth, marital status, interests, and more. This is an incredibly powerful targeting tool tailor-made for law firms that have a good handle on their ideal target market.

Once you have created a Custom Audiences list on Facebook, the site has a feature called Lookalike Audiences that will target other people who are similar to those in your Custom Audiences list. To create a Lookalike Audience, Facebook examines the common qualities of the people in your Custom Audience and then finds other people in the region you specify who best match the qualities of your Custom Audience. You can use any of the Facebook targeting options to narrow your Lookalike list.

Using Facebook’s robust audience identification tools, we have found that Facebook ads typically outperform Google ads and are much cheaper to boot. And who doesn’t like that kind of change?