If you have a law firm webpage, hopefully, you also have social media pages for your law firm.  Your social media pages should really be an extension of your webpage.

On your social media pages, you can post updates on your law firm.  You might post useful articles and information on the area of law you practice.  You might post videos.  You might post photos.  You might give behind the scenes look in your law firm.

As I talked about in a previous article, you likely want to do away with your law firm bulletins.  Save yourself the printing costs of these bulletins and instead work to establish a following on your social media pages.

But as you make posts on your social media accounts, consider using hashtags to optimize your posts.  For some, there is a resistance and dislike of hashtags.  To many, they don’t understand hashtags.  It seems like it hurts the readability of posts.  Many complain it’s the dumbing down of intelligent conversation.  To others, it’s the kind of things young people may do (like listening to loud music), but it’s something they don’t want to do with their social media posts.

At the end of the day, hashtags are here and hashtags are not going away.  So, whether you like loud music or not, you’ll have to get used to the use of hashtags.  The reason people like them is because hashtags help optimize social media posts for viewing.

In other words, if you put the hashtag #personalinjurylaw in a post about personal injury law, your post will now show up for people searching that hashtag.  The same would be true for hashtags like #criminallaw or #divorcelaw or any other area of the law.  So, hashtags result in more views — and more views from non-followers.  More views, and more new followers, is a good thing from a business and marketing perspective for your law firm.

Hashtags can also be used to brand.  Many businesses come up with a unique hashtag for their particular business.  When customers want to look for posts from a particular business, they might search the hashtag of that business in places like Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus or other social media mediums.  Perhaps you could come up with a hashtag for you law firm in the same regard that your clients and followers may know and like?

While hashtags might be a foreign concept for many, if you are trying to promote your law firm online, it’s important to have social media pages.  It’s also important to make frequent and regular social media posts that employ hashtags.  Whether you like their use or not, hashtags are here and they are here to stay.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them below.