By Adele Baxby Meehan 

At the recent Lawyer Marketing Leadership Summit, a theme which reared his head time and time again was the desire from both GCs and other clients for lawyers to show their human side. The pandemic has highlighted the need for a more human touch and many, sick to the back teeth of endless online meetings, are yearning for face-to-face contact in the near future (hopefully).

Adele Baxby Meehan

A more human touch when it comes to legal marketing can certainly go a long way in creating an impression and ensuring a firm or individual stands out from the crowd (another hot topic discussed at past Lawyer Marketing Summits). But how to tread the line between maintaining a professional, authoritative tone and displaying some personality can be tricky – and one that many lawyers struggle with. LinkedIn isn’t Facebook and whilst some lawyers can feel very comfortable sharing more of a personal glimpse on these platforms, many either don’t feel relaxed sharing this type of content or can go too far in the other direction and end up potentially impacting their reputation by appearing unprofessional, too familiar or even alienating a proportion of their target audience.

So how do you inject personality into professional marketing and content whilst not going too far or adopting a tone which jars with you or your firm’s branding and place in the market?

The following tips should help inject some much-needed personality into content, be it social media posts or other marketing material, without appearing unprofessional or completely at odds with the wider legal profession.

Don’t be afraid to express an opinion
Many lawyers use platforms like LinkedIn to share relevant news stories. Whilst this is a great way to ensure you have regular visibility, sharing without any comment doesn’t help add to the conversation. Simply sharing one line of opinion or comment around why the news piece is relevant helps distinguish the post on the platform and invites conversation. Write it in the way you’d flag the story with a colleague – conversational yet still professional. And don’t forget your target audience and how they’d perceive the story.

Use your camera
Including photos in social media posts often means they gain more traction – we’re all living in a fast-paced world with content being thrown at us from every angle. “A picture paints a thousand words” is a cliché but it’s true and a photo or image can make a user pause over a post. With more and more people working at home, a small glimpse into a home-work set-up or a shot of a lunchtime walk can give people a little insight into you and who you are away from the office. The tip here is to keep the images linked to work – a lunchtime walk could be an opportunity to reflect on the importance of work-life balance or an image of a busy desk a chance to talk about the successes of remote hearings.
Post about your passions

Genuine passion for a topic or issue creates an energy which can inspire others. Writing about an issue which is relevant to your role which you’re passionate about will come across and is much more likely to encourage interaction and stimulate conversation. Issues such as work-life balance, access to childcare, diversity and inclusion and environmental impacts are high on everyone’s agenda these days and appropriate for a professional platform.

Ultimately, it’s important to only post what you’re comfortable with. Sometimes a simple rule rolled out for posting on social media is to only post publicly what you’d say to your Mum. In a professional context, always have your colleagues and clients in mind. But the recent learnings from the Marketing Summit were clear – don’t neglect that personal touch and social media in particular can be a brilliant way to express a little more ‘you’.

Adele Baxby Meehan is a creative and content director at Kysen.