Marci Taylor’s recent post on Find Your Mantra Blog:

A New Study by Infinite Spada Considers ROI
on Law Firm Content

Content strategy remains a leading strategy in legal marketing, and many law firms continue to generate content at a rate that, at times, seems comparable to legal publishers. Professionals generate content to (1) demonstrate thought leadership in their area of expertise and (2) stay top of mind with clients and potential clients as a leader in the area of expertise.

With all of the investment in content generation, in the millions of dollars in lawyer time for many firms, what is the return on investment? A recent study by Infinite Spada indicates that ROI for law firm content is definitely not what it should be.

shutterstock_310037273The study, “Attorneys vs Accountants: Who is Winning The Content Battle? A Comparison Study of Content Success in the Legal and Accounting Industries,” notes that while lawyers and firms are great at creating content, lawyers are lagging far behind their counterparts in accounting in content amplification. In other words, accountants are much better in making sure their content is actually seen– which is the point of the exercise! The study, done in partnership with content intelligence firm Buzz Sumo, focused on shares of content across social media channels and found that accounting firms outperformed law firms across all of the leading social platforms – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and GooglePlus.

The study provides specific strategies and tactics on how to increase the number of content shares. It demonstrates that using infographics, video, photos, original research and co-produced content greatly increases the likelihood that your content will be shared.

Infinite Spada also provides data on the impact of content length on the likelihood of shares. Interestingly, while in other industries, longer content pieces receive a greater number of shares, for legal and accounting firms, shorter content pieces were shared more often. This is great data to help convince lawyers that every blog post, alert or article need not be a legal treatise. In fact, shorter articles that concisely convey the point and demonstrate some analysis on the part of the author will have a bigger payoff.  To read the study, click here.