While social media can be a powerful tool to work fewer hours and still earn a full-time income, it’s essential to approach it intentionally and avoid spending excessive time on it. If you wish to build and grow a flexible virtual law practice, you need to be very intentional with your relationship with social media while harnessing its incredible marketing power. You must be careful to limit the amount of time you spend on it, or it can naturally eat into your work hours really quickly.

In this article, we’ll explore the downsides of spending too much time on social media, like the addictive dopamine effect and how it can suck the soul out of us. But fear not, I’ll also share my tips on how to use social media strategically without losing your sanity by outsourcing social media management and repurposing long-form content to maximize your efforts.

If you’d rather listen than read, you can do that here:

Why You Shouldn’t Spend All of Your Time Marketing on Social Media

Now, before I share my tips for achieving this, I want to reinforce some of the other reasons why I don’t personally like to spend all of my time on social media, and I don’t think that you should either.

1. The Dopamine Effect of Social Media

When you engage on social media, the dopamine receptors in your brain are activated. As Harvard Medical School research technician Trevor Haynes put it, social media platforms leverage the same neural circuitry of our brains activated by slot machines and cocaine to keep us using their products. The positive reinforcement we receive through comments and interactions keeps us coming back for more. Regular engagement with social media can increase our brain’s dopamine expectations. If these expectations are not met due to lack of engagement or offline periods, it can lead to feelings of depression. Now, when you enter into the world of marketing for your business online, I think it’s very easy for us to not only experience this in a heightened way, but also rationalize our need to spend time on social media as we build our businesses. Does that sound super healthy to you?

2. Lack of Enrichment

Now, this is just one girl’s opinion, but in my view, spending significant time on social media often leaves us feeling unproductive, uninspired, and unfulfilled. It can be a soul-sucking experience that wastes valuable time. I might be ruffling some feathers, but am I wrong?

Imagine this situation for me:

Let’s say it’s 07:30 p.m.

You find yourself sitting on the couch scrolling Instagram or TikTok. Choose your poison. And about 20 minutes into this, you have a vague awareness that you’d like to get off and do something of consequence, like clean up your kitchen, wash off your makeup, or pack lunch for tomorrow. But another 45 second video of nonsense captures your attention, and before you know it, it’s 08:15 p.m.. You put the phone down, and then you feel….

Do you feel inspired? Refreshed? Fulfilled? Edified? Productive? Happy?

Personally speaking, that’s almost never what I feel when I find myself sucked into social media for any length of time. And I’m guessing you might be able to relate.

3. Social Media is Not the Best Return on Investment (ROI)

Now, this is a generalized statement. There are some people and lawyers, even a few that have come through our accelerator program, who are absolutely killing it on social media.

However, for most people, using social media in a way that depends on the algorithm to generate organic leads, which means leads that did not come from that did not come from paid ads will take a lot of time and dedication and will not render the greatest return on your time investment. So now that I have completely trashed social media, let me maybe surprise you by saying, while I don’t spend a lot of time on social media, I built my entire business on it.

Balancing Social Media for Business Success

First, let me just reconcile this seemingly contradicting statement. I built my business by building relationships with people I met through social media, but I’ve never spent a lot of time scrolling, posting, or commenting on social media. With that said, I do think that social media should have a place in your strategic marketing plan, depending on what platforms you choose to focus on, and I would focus on one or two at the most at first. You do need to have a fresh and active presence there on those channels. And I analogize this to having a manicured lawn.

1. Focus on Select Platforms

To maintain an active presence on social media, it’s advisable to choose one or two platforms initially. This allows for better management and consistent engagement. 3.3 Importance of a Well-Manicured Presence: Your social media pages should reflect that you are an expert in your field and open for business. Think of it as a well-manicured lawn that creates a positive impression for potential clients or referral partners.

2. Outsource Social Media

When I started my business, my daughter was very young and I was doing my social media myself at first. I found that I was spending so much time on it that it would really leave me feeling drained and guilty for not being present with her. I had a pretty limited work schedule at the time, by design, because she was only in daycare for a few days a week. During the time I was with her, I certainly didn’t want to be on social media trying to market my business. And when I was working, I needed to be focusing on client work and not just spend all of my time marketing.

So, naturally, I just let it fall to the bottom of my to do list. Eventually, it became a burden and felt like something that I really should be doing but wasn’t. Finally, in the third month of my business, I decided to outsource my social media management to a virtual assistant. It was the best decision that I made for my business and I routinely recommend to mentorship clients that they also outsource social media management as soon as possible.

3. Repurpose Long-Form Content

Whether you are doing social media yourself or you’re outsourcing, I recommend that you make your posts on social media derivative of some form of long form content. Long form content could be a blog post, podcast, or a video. At first, it will probably be a blog for most people because that’s really one of the easiest forms of long form content to create. This is something that you could do weekly or biweekly and then take snippets of that blog to repurpose as social media posts

Building a flexible virtual law practice requires a deliberate approach to social media. While social media can be addictive and time-consuming, it can also be a valuable tool for growing your business. By outsourcing social media management, creating derivative content, and prioritizing strategic relationships, you can harness the power of social media while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Remember, social media should complement your business, not consume all your time. Stay tuned for our upcoming article on building strategic relationships for generating referrals in your practice!

Are you ready to build a virtual, flexible law practice on your terms and around your most important priorities in life? Join me in the Accelerator, our 6 month, done-with-you program to build, launch, and grow your virtual, flexible law firm.