Episode 297 Modern Social Media Strategies for Law Firms with Ania Barycka
Welcome to the wealthy woman lawyer podcast. What
Davina:if
Intro:you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more? Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now here's Devina.
Davina:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Devina Frederick, and my guest today is Anya Baritzka. Anya is a law school graduate and the founder of Ask Anya Media, a boutique social media agency she has successfully led for the past five years With a strategic focus on organic content marketing and video first approach, Anya partners with law firms and other businesses to develop authentic multi platform strategies that drive meaningful engagement and long term growth. Anya is also and has been the social media manager partner of Wealthy Woman Lawyer for the past four years, so I'm super excited to have her on the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast to share her expertise with the rest of you. She has been my best kept secret.
Davina:So help me welcome Anya to the show. Hi Anya, it's so good to see you.
Ania:Hi Devina, good to see you too.
Davina:So for those of you who do not know, Anya and I have been working together for, she reminded me four years I had it wrong I was thinking it was only a couple years but so much time has gone by it's been four years since we've been working together she is my wonderful instagram social media manager so if you guys have been following me on instagram you've been seeing Anya and her team's work to try to get me to make me look as good as possible on Instagram. I'm glad that you're here. You've been on the podcast before, but I thought it was time it's been a couple years. I thought it was time that we did an update so that people can sort of know what is happening in social media these days and what they need to be paying attention to if they're wanting to get clients from social media. So why don't we start out though with you telling a little bit, I've done your intro, talked about your bio, but why don't you tell us a little bit, I think your journey from getting a JD, going to law school, and then deciding much to your parents' shock and horror to go start an Instagram business.
Davina:Tell me about that journey and what that was like for you, of what went into that decision.
Ania:Yeah, absolutely. I did get a JD, you know, with immigrant parents you only kind of have three choices: lawyer, doctor, so I did go to law school, finished law school, realized that you know after four years of working at a firm, I enjoyed social media more than I enjoyed, you know, working at a firm, doing mergers, acquisitions, which was the department I was in, but I did social media way before law school since 2011. So it's not something that I just kind of randomly started to be interested in, you know, during law school or after law school. So I did it in 2011. I paid for some of my law school tuition with doing social media work.
Davina:Wow.
Ania:So it was going back to something that I already was doing and loved. It was just to the disapproval of my parents.
Davina:Well, that's how it is sometimes. I certainly have my share of apparent disapproval, but I bet they are quite proud of you now because they've seen what you've grown. You've had this business now for how long? How long have you had this? Five years.
Davina:Years. Okay.
Ania:Five years.
Davina:It's really blown up in the last few years, right?
Ania:Yep.
Davina:You're doing a lot of work with lawyers, which is why I wanted to have you on specifically because you have experience in working with law firms and lawyers, whereas maybe other people are doing social media, work with more coaches and influencers and things like that. What do you think the difference is in how you approach accounts Instagram or Pinterest or TikTok or any of these when you're working with lawyers as opposed to working with coaches and influencers?
Ania:Yeah absolutely so lawyers in general, seem to the general public to be less approachable. So it's it's very important to make lawyers you know seem friendly on social media, have them introduce their team, show kind of their services, but also become like this friendly face on people's feeds. An influencer can do that easily. Right? A coach can do that easily.
Ania:They can kind of get used to being being on social media. But for lawyers, it's harder. It's not their cup of tea generally to be on video. They generally just wanna do, you know, a great job for their clients and, you know, not show up on social media. Right?
Davina:Right. Right. So there are some lawyers out there that we see who naturally they sort of grew up on social media and they naturally gravitate to social media. I know Single Mom Attorney is one that is a client of mine and she has built a huge following on social media. 98% of her clients come from Instagram and TikTok, which is really kind of rare from what I've seen.
Davina:But that's something she just does naturally on her own. Kind of like with you, you had a passion for Instagram and it sort of grew. What would you say to I know you've had to deal with me. I'm somebody who's well over the age of 30, 40, 50, and it presents a challenge for me because I didn't grow up with social media. I'm a private person, I don't really love to put my personal business out there, and the older we get, the less we want to see ourselves on video.
Davina:What would you say to those lawyers who are maybe in their 40s and 50s and they're going, I don't really want to put my face out there on video. What are some of the tips that you have for them?
Ania:Yeah. So first of all, you don't have to start with showing up on video. Right? Show up, you know, start with start with just social media, just, you know, photos, right? Graphics, you know, whatever kind of feels comfortable for you.
Ania:If you're able to outsource it, obviously I recommend that doing it yourself takes away from doing other things. But start with simple things, you know, it can be photos with text on them. It doesn't have to be video. Obviously I recommend video because you have to compete with the amount of content that is out there, other firms that are promoting themselves, you know, on social media. So I would say start slow.
Ania:If you don't want to jump into video, start with B roll videos, right? I'll be working with, you know, with you. We, we work on those all the time every month and it takes a while to get comfortable even with those. Right?
Davina:Right. Right. When I started out, I used to do a lot of talking, more talking videos and then over time, I got to the point where I didn't really have the bandwidth or the time for that in my business and And so you guys filled in the gap with some other content until I got to a point where I was like, okay, now I can do that. So there's all sorts of different ways. One of the things you talk about is video.
Davina:So let's talk about the different types of, I'm focusing more on Instagram because that's kind of your area of expertise, but you also do some things on TikTok, Facebook, right? But when I'm speaking of Instagram, it's Reels, it's Stories, it's your feed. Which of those should we be doing and which should we like not worry so much about? So what should we not worry so much about and what should we really be focusing our energy on and why?
Ania:Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So when it comes to your feed on Instagram, I would say you should, you know, post new content, as a law firm at least three times a week, whether that's video, static posts, photos. That's kind of the minimum for at least this year, in in 2025. Stories are really important because your warmest audience lives there.
Ania:They're the people who are watching you, and and and have you as one of their top profiles that they're watching. So stories only live for about twenty four hours. It's one of the best ways to kind of get immediate responses from people if you're posting to stories on a daily basis. Reply to the story if you have this issue or workers' comp or whatever it is that, you know, somebody's kind of thinking about some issues, you can ask questions and get real, real people into your DMs and actually start having a, you know, a conversation with a potential client there. So I would always say feed, you know, and stories are kind of most important highlights are gonna be going away.
Ania:Pinned posts are important. The top, you know, three pin posts on your Instagram account, be very strategic about those because those are the ones that people see right away. So that would be my kind of initial advice for Instagram.
Davina:So it's interesting that highlights are going away. I have been waiting for highlights to go away because I find them so useless and so boring. I don't know who's looking at highlights anymore. Mine are all old because I we did them and I don't think anybody's looking at them. I don't look at highlights.
Davina:I'm not really a stories person but I am a reels person. I like to look at reels and I will get myself down a hole looking at reels but you know, somebody like my sister tells me, oh, I just spend my whole time looking at stories. So I find it very interesting because Instagram has a little something for everybody the way that they How are Reels and Stories different?
Ania:So reels, so basically static posts on Instagram mainly reach, people who follow you. If the post is doing really well, it gets pushed out to a cold audience, but it's generally for the people that follow you Reels, so videos, you know, under ninety seconds, are generally pushed out to a cold audience. So non followers, which is kind of where you wanna be. Right? So that's why video content and a video strategy for anybody is really, really important because it gets pushed out generally to a new audience.
Ania:So that would be kind of the main difference between, you know, graphics and videos. Stories, much less people watch them. Like the numbers are much lower than your followers, for example. But the warmest, we call them the warmest audience, the people who are really interested in what you have to offer, they wanna see behind the scenes. They wanna see what you do every day.
Ania:The boring coffee that you have, the coffee that you spilled, me walking my dog gets so many replies from people. Right? Oh, wow. What kind of dog? Right?
Ania:Like it's nothing to do with, you know, my business, me refilling Nespresso pods, like the most random stuff that you could put in your stories, you'll see that people organically reply to. And the moment that they need your specific service, or if they break that barrier, especially for lawyers with the kind of unapproachability sometimes they break that first barrier to reply to that story. If it's a personal account or, you know, there's personal content behind that law firm in some way. Some people have offices. Some people do fun virtual stuff with their teams.
Ania:It's a fun way to break that first barrier and to get into DMs.
Davina:I think that's where a lot of people maybe struggle is they say, you know, I I want to put my law firm out there but I don't want to put my personal business out there because, you know, maybe I don't live the influencer life that other people like show their glam, right? I often think it's a view We were joking about, I've done some more b rolls this year. Last year I didn't do b rolls. This year I'm doing b rolls. And b rolls for those who don't know are just kind of those rolls of their videos of me not talking, doing stuff, and then we're putting content on top of it.
Davina:And for somebody like me, I live a very uninfluencer life. And so I think to myself, well gosh, how many like do people want to see me making a salad? Do people want to see me? But one of my most popular posts is me sitting in a chair and reading a book and probably because everybody loves the chair, everybody asked me where I got the chair and all that kind of stuff. It's my secret, I'm not going to tell.
Davina:So I guess for a lot of lawyers and the question is, for those of us who are a little older and old school, say, how does that translate into business for my law firm? Aren't people just being nosy about my life? Just because somebody likes me walking my dog, is that going to translate into business or is that just like stalkers or you know fans?
Ania:Yeah, I get it. Yeah, it's about breaking those barriers between you know me looking at your content, it being, you know, solely about, you know, some type of law, real estate law or whatever it is to, Hey, here's, all of our attorneys at the firm have dogs. For national pet day, we all post about their dogs. Like it doesn't have to be personal like this is my firstborn child that I'm putting on stories. It can be just as simple as here are the four legged companions that accompany us every day to our jobs.
Ania:It doesn't have to be super personal.
Davina:It's about humanizing and kind of just saying, I'm a person just like you. I have the same, I've got a spouse,
Ania:I've got
Davina:kids, it's messy sometimes. Being more relatable. I will say I have people who I run into at events or conferences or whatever, or people who reach out to me who feel like they know me and I don't know them, but I know them maybe from just seeing their interaction, but they feel like they know me when they have conversations with me. And one of the things that does is it breaks down that barrier right from the beginning because they already have heard me give advice or talk about things or you know educate people and so they come with a lot of knowledge about who I am as a person. It's somebody that may have integrity or be trustworthy or you know have that appearance and so that makes those conversations a little bit easier and sometimes I have people who follow me for two years before they need me and then they're they're reaching out and I found you on Instagram or I listened to your podcast or whatever.
Davina:You talked about, I want to talk about some ideas for video that people can do if they are shy and do not want to put their own face or they don't like the sound of their voice. Know, what are some kind of video ideas that we have that they could do that might be fun?
Ania:I would really start with B roll. Literally you sitting in a chair and reading a book, like you do Davina, like pick your favorite chair, pick your favorite book and just film yourself, put a tripod, put it against a shelf and just film yourself doing that. And then you can put text over that video on a trending audio, write a caption, and boom, there's a video. So that's one type of video that you can easily make. Another type of video that people really love are memes.
Ania:Right? So you can use something like CapCut, which is a free app, for generating all different types of content, but, you know, for memes that we love using as well on your account, because they're funny. You know, you have, you know, some particular person making some whatever saying something, and it's so relatable that people share it. And metrics these days on all all social media are changing. People are liking things less.
Ania:They're commenting less, but dark social is increasing in popularity. So share What
Davina:is dark social? Yeah. What is dark Dark
Ania:social is all about the types of interactions with content that you can't easily see. So the stuff that you're sending to your sister on Instagram, the stuff that I'm sharing with my mom on Facebook in messenger. So it's basically sends and shares. Those are the two main metrics of dark social. There's obviously more.
Ania:But if I would say the most important kind of metrics these days and, you know, the head of Instagram talks about this all the time, shares are extremely important. Now you can actually see the shares on your videos and on your content publicly. It's becoming more important than the likes and the comments these days.
Davina:That's so interesting. I definitely am. My husband and my sister, my younger sister, they cannot keep up with all of the things that I share with them in their DMs. Both having to come up with, they got to make time just to respond, to heart and like all the things I'm sharing with them. But I can't keep it to myself.
Davina:I'm like, oh my god, this is hysterical. You have to see this. Or this is appalling. You have to see this. And those are my two people, my husband and my youngest sister.
Davina:I want to talk about how a social media manager works with you because I think a lot of people think well you know I have to do social media, I have to learn how to use the instagram app or I have to learn how to use TikTok And it doesn't come naturally to me. You know, I didn't grow up like that. So I have to learn. I have to take time to learn this. And I'm a busy lawyer.
Davina:I don't have time to learn Instagram. But how does a social media manager make that easier for you?
Ania:Yeah, absolutely. So generally the amount of time that we require, at least us as an agent agency at Ask On You Media, is about forty minutes of your time every single month for a call and to review content. So there is some additional time if you're also filming from scripts that we give you, for example, like all of this is we talk to you once a month. We deliver scripts to you to film for you and your, you know, team members at the firm, other attorneys. You get them back to us.
Ania:We do the editing. We write all the captions. We write all the stories. We get it to you in neat little Google calendar every single month. You just review it for, I dunno, sometimes it takes thirty minutes, sometimes forty minutes.
Ania:It really just depends, but I say it's about an hour time of, of an attorney every single month talking with us. And then filming is a little bit extra. In total two and a half hours a month, three hours a month max. So it's really efficient, efficient way to, you know, do your social media is to actually have somebody do it for you, but to give you that strategic and creative direction ongoing for there to be I'm
Davina:gonna share my experience in regard to that. When we first started working together, it took me much longer to review things because Anya and her team had to get to know me, know my language and know how I speak and know what I'm talking about. I was trying to get clear on what I wanted to share and what I didn't. It took a lot longer. Over time, as we've worked together longer and longer, now it's very quick.
Davina:Usually I get the calendar. Sometimes we have a meeting, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we just throw some emails back and forth. And then I get the calendar for her and usually it takes me less than a half an hour to go through it and just go I like I approve this. I don't.
Davina:This needs to edit. Most of it I approve. Very few things I edit. And The longer I think you work with somebody, the more they get to know your voice and they get to know what you like and what you don't like, the faster that process becomes. Because I remember having a conversation with you, it was early in 2024, I said, I really want this to go faster, like I don't want to be the clog in the pipeline to get this stuff to go out.
Davina:I started relying more on Anya and on her team to create the, you know, just put stuff in front of me and say, do you like this or don't you like this? And and really absorbing all of the content I put out there and coming up with their own captions instead of me, you know, going into that and then, I just made a decision to stop editing as much. So I just look at it, I go, is this efficient? Does it get the job done? Is it what I want?
Davina:And of course, over time, they're just better and better because the more they know me, the better they get. So kudos to you guys for that. And also when I started working with Anja, it was Anja, now she's got a team. And so they are all behind the scenes doing all this work. And I think one of the other advantages of the social media manager for me has been, and for my clients that I have referred to Anja, has been that I don't keep I have so much going on in my life and in my business and I'm not, I'm on Instagram as a lurker, as a scroller, sharing things with my sister and my husband and that's it.
Davina:I don't really have an enthusiasm for spending forty five minutes to create a day in the life of Devina. I don't keep up with the latest trends of what is going on. What's trending right now? What's hot? What's something we should do?
Davina:What's something we should not do. So I count on my social media manager team to say, just like Anya just said, highlights are out, stories are in. So I think that's a big benefit as well for those who aren't natural to these apps, whether that's TikTok or Instagram or Pinterest or whatever it is, Facebook. You guys have more of pulse on what's going on, what's more popular. Do we have to do dances on social media to be able to get the algorithm to like us?
Davina:What we have to do?
Ania:No, no dancing required. I always say that everybody's always so scared. I won't dance Anya. I'm like, that's fine. I don't dance either.
Ania:Right? So, you know, I'd never ask you to do something that we don't do. Right. So I believe in professional, you know, created social media. You know, we all love the dancing TikToks, the, the, the, I don't know, the dogs and everything like that, but for most people, you know, when you're promoting a business, you don't have to be saying super controversial stuff that gets you in trouble.
Ania:You don't need to be dancing. You do have to put yourself out there, your firm, who you are, who you represent, or what you represent as a firm, what services you provide. People need to hear things seven times before they buy. Right. In general.
Ania:Right. So like ongoing, bringing that information to, you know, the front of your Instagram feed, which not everybody sees anyway, for example, or Facebook or whatever it is, TikTok. So ongoing, finding ways to relay the same information in different ways doesn't require dancing, but it does require following some trends. You know, we attend conferences, you know, at least one conference every quarter, just to keep ourselves on trend. We subscribe to all different trend reports, which deliver, you know, all these trends that we know, Hey, this one will work great for this client.
Ania:This one will work, you know, great for another client. They don't all work the same way for all clients across the board.
Davina:Right. And I think if you, I think if everybody's, some people will jump on some trends and other people will say this trend really resonates with me and let's do something with this trend. And I think that is, I think there's really an one of the things that you and I've talked about is just being authentic. And there is something that I can say or do and it will be authentically me, but it might have a little bit of a trend to it as well in doing. We might find something like, oh, this is hilarious.
Davina:We have to do this. But then something else, I'm like, no way I'm doing that. Like, I'm not the one who's going to lip sync to a song or whatever. I see people do that and I think it's funny. But I don't I just don't do that you know I would be like probably messing it all up I would be saying the wrong things at the wrong time I'd be going what's wrong with my screen her mouth is absolutely viral might go viral let's talk about going viral because I want to ask you about going viral A lot of people have this sort of idea that if I go viral, this is going to just be amazing for my business if I go viral.
Davina:Talk to me about going viral because I know you have some strong opinions on that.
Ania:I love talking about going viral, because a lot of people come to us and on discovery calls, they're like, so how long will it take on you for me to go viral? And I'm like, that should never be your goal. Your goal should be whatever kind of clients you want to attract. Right? Social media is top of the funnel.
Ania:So we need to bring people to you and know that you exist going viral introduces you to a completely cold audience that has nothing that doesn't, not even interested in what you Right. We, you know, and this has happened many times over the five years that I've worked in this business, but we've gone viral. And then we have a problem because we have thousands of new followers that are now, you know, in, in, in our feed and are following us, but are not even interested in the content. And there's a lot of problems with, with, you know, having all these random people, then they leave weird comments. You have to get rid of them.
Ania:You have to block them. Someone like me needs to get paid more to now go through all these, you know, followers, potentially remove them. And I've had a company pay us thousands of dollars extra to remove 5,000 followers that they gained from going viral for a meme that they posted actually themselves. Oh wow. It was the only thing they posted.
Ania:Everything else we posted, they posted the meme. They went viral. They had to pay us thousands more to remove all these people.
Davina:Oh wow and it's very tedious my first instagram account which I still have started out as a business account and I've now switched it to a personal account but I paid somebody this is before I met Anya I paid some money to grow my instagram account and she used a hashtag strategy that grew my account to like 10,000 people overnight. I was getting a lot of bots, lot of men from Africa said they were wanting to meet me and sell me something. I was getting a lot of people that just weren't even ever going to be interested in hiring a lawyer. They just wanted to lurk or send me porn or whatever. So I had to, I went in and first of all, I fired the person and then I had to go in and unfollow.
Davina:And let me tell you, that is a chore because Instagram does not make it easy for you to go in. They start you off with all of your most favorite people, so you've got to really scroll down and go down and go way down in the list to start unfollowing. So I still have a number of people who follow me on there because I wasn't able, I just lost the patience with going through and clearing it out. I know what a hassle that is, it's definitely not something that we're looking to do. When I started at Wealthy Woman Lawyer and I hired Adia, our goal was to create a really curated audience.
Davina:So we wanted to make sure that at least let's say 80% of our people are lawyers, law firm owners, not just randos. And we still have some randos who, I run ads and I'm sure there are people who come from those ads. Some of them are like, Why are you following me? But then there are others who are highly qualified, Because I'm focused on a curated list and I think that's really the strategy for anybody who's selling professional services is you're not an influencer in terms of the more people you have, the more of this pin I could sell. You are an influencer in terms of those people who might need your services, you want to be the one they pick when they need them.
Davina:Though it's a little bit different strategy than you might have if you were like trying to sell clothes or something, sell a widget. We talked about, so we cover going viral, let me see. One of the things you mentioned to me, and this is kind of moving away from Instagram, you talked about Google My Business. Tell me about, Tell me adding videos to Google My Business to keep your firm relevant. So tell me about Google My Business.
Davina:First of all, tell me what it is and tell me why we want to be using videos on Google My Business.
Ania:Yeah, absolutely. So Google My Business is basically a digital Google home on the Internet for you. So it's where you get your reviews. It's where your opening hours are, where your website is. You know, you can link all these things to your Google My Business.
Ania:Even if you're a virtual company, we're a virtual company. And having a Google my business is a great location for, you know, when people search for, let's say a specific type of lawyer in a location and type in those keywords, Google catches them. Right? It's called SEO, search engine optimize optimization. And they find, you know, your Google my business.
Ania:Let's say it's first, second, third on the list. As we continue in 2025, '20 '20 '6, you know, video gets even more important, and search optimization also is working for video. So what you're saying in videos is also being categorized by Google, just like Pinterest is showing up in Google. So for example, if you're adding videos to your Google my business, it's not just just, you know, information about how to contact you. You're gonna get categorized in all different types of new ways with all the things you're saying in the videos.
Ania:So if you take a video about you talking about your services or even a simple one, you're introducing yourself. Right? And you put that into Google My Business, it's gonna be categorized in general in Google. So more chances to find you and for the people that really need your help to find you and your firm.
Davina:So I have a question for you about that because one of the challenges that we're having with Google is if you operate a remote business, an online business, a virtual law firm, or a business like mine, it's difficult to get verified on Google now. They've changed it. You have to take a video of your office, you have to take a video of the sign, you have to do all this stuff. Have you guys found a way around that or a way that you help clients with that? Because that verification process, if you can't get verified, you can't respond to your reviews.
Davina:There's a lot of things you can't do. Can't update your photos, all those things like that. How are you guys dealing with that? Have you found that to be the case?
Ania:Yeah, I know exactly about the process that you're talking about. So I actually had somebody film the room that they work in as their office and it worked. So, sometimes it takes a few tries to get verified. They send a code to your house still sometimes, you know, where you're located just to make sure that you actually exist. So I think there's more barriers to entry, than ever.
Ania:But once you actually get verified and have Google my business, you know, possibilities are endless in terms of search engine optimization. Right.
Davina:So you guys also help with Google My Business and what you do now?
Ania:Yes. Yes, we do. Mainly because video, we had clients asking about Google My Business, catering company, for example, was like, we, we want videos on our Google My Business. Was like, okay, tried that out for a year and guess what? They're growing in, in leads.
Ania:So we tried it for a law firm. Works as well. Tried it for ourselves. So it's, it's a nobody's talking about this yet, by the way. Wow.
Ania:Yeah. Nobody is. Nobody is. Nobody is. Nobody is.
Ania:Yeah.
Davina:Yeah. And it's one of the things that I often tell lawyers that I think the number one number one place they need to be is on Google because Google is right now what used to be yellow pages. Every lawyer was in the yellow pages. Now everybody, people are going to Google and it's really interesting because now AI has been added to Google and you are just, I mean, people are just nuts if they're not using AI. They're not going in and it's in everything.
Davina:People are integrated in everything they do. So, you definitely want to be giving Google lots of information about you being controlling that narrative about you and your business or somebody else will, What are some of the challenges that lawyers may have when they're trying to manage their own social media?
Ania:Yeah. Well, A, they could be doing the wrong thing, right? They can not be connecting Facebook to Instagram properly and having that cross post automatically for themselves. For example, I've seen so many hacked accounts, so many accounts that have been, you know, I lost my account. I don't know what happened.
Ania:You know, people just don't sit on meta all day. Right. And know what to do. You know, we actually went through a TikTok account being disabled, a really big TikTok account for a law firm. They called us.
Ania:We actually got it reinstated because we actually knew what to do because we deal with this. Can't do this for everyone. Please don't call me, but you know, you just don't have that experience with these apps. Then somebody who sits in this every single day, right? And sees these things come across your desk all the time.
Ania:It's also a major distraction if you're supposed to be actually practicing a lot, earning a lot more money per hour, you know, doing what, what, what you're best at, you know, offload to an agency that can do a really great job.
Davina:I wonder about, I think there's tremendous value in social media managers because of the differences in the platforms. I think one of the challenges we have is like, oh, I create this content now. Want to put it on every platform. And I think every platform is very different and you have to really be focused on that particular platform and what they're looking for. And I'll give you an example of that.
Davina:I have been doing this podcast for six years now. We just took down our YouTube because I was never creating the content specifically for YouTube. I was creating content and using it for our Instagram, using it for Facebook and using it for LinkedIn. Then I was kind of as an afterthought putting it on YouTube because why not? But I wasn't focused on creating content specifically the way YouTube likes it, where I'm trying to get people to subscribe and like on YouTube and all of that.
Davina:And I found that it was kind of, after, and then I spent a little bit of time investing with it, having someone kind of take over the account, try to do the best they could with what I was giving them. And what I discovered is that 78% of the people looking at my content were men. And since I run Wealthy Woman Lawyer and my clients are women, I was like, you know, this is not where my clients are. And I think one of the things that a social media manager can do depending on, you know, which platforms they work on, and I think it's important to pick people that work on a specific platform, right? Yeah.
Davina:And have that knowledge is to really help you create content that that platform is going to love. Right? If I had taken my videos for YouTube and I said I'm going to make these specific to YouTube and I'm going to hire somebody who's going to help me create it specific for YouTube, I think my channel would have grown a lot more. Now I feel like it's not worth it because I don't think my ideal clients are there. Not to say that women aren't looking at stuff on YouTube, but it wasn't as powerful for me as it is on Instagram or on Facebook.
Davina:So I'm sure you have encountered that with some clients where they're coming to you and they're creating something that they just want you to use it as it is across the board. And while you do some of that, you really have to sort of tailor to what the app wants, right?
Ania:Yeah, absolutely. LinkedIn is a great example. You can't just slap on what you're doing on Instagram to LinkedIn. Right?
Davina:Yeah.
Ania:It's a different platform and people engage with it differently. You know, text does really, really well and longer stories and, you know, captions do much better without any graphics, without any videos attached. For example, now on It's
Davina:the opposite of Instagram.
Ania:So who would know that right? Most people wouldn't, right? You have to you know talk to somebody who knows what they're doing.
Davina:Who knows the platform. I not a big lover of LinkedIn. I know some of my colleagues, different people I've had on the podcast, they get all their business from LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. Get all my business.
Davina:I have tried, but it's like a big snooze for me. I just don't enjoy hanging out over there. I'm really remiss in answering know, chat over there. And I've hired different companies and tried different programs. But one of the things that I think, which I always tell people this when it comes to their marketing anyway, is I think you need a strategy that works around what you like, as well as where your clients hang out.
Davina:There needs to be that nexus between that. Because if you're, if you were saying Davina, you have to dance on TikTok to get clients, I would be like, I guess I won't get clients, right? Because I'm just not going to do it. I can dance for those of you who are wondering, but I don't, I just don't, I don't, you know, and it's just not something that I'm going to invest time in. And so I think, but I think there are so many things that I do love that I can use those gifts and those talents and those, you know, that passion for it and show up as myself on in other places where it makes sense for me to do that.
Davina:And I'm not saying everybody's on TikTok dances. I know there are a lot of people who have accounts on TikToks where they're doing other things and of course we don't know what's going to happen with TikTok, but that's just an example for this. So what advice would you have for a law firm who's thinking about outsourcing their social media? Before we get to that, let me ask you this. For your clients who are using Instagram and TikTok and Pinterest and these other platforms for your law firm clients specifically, what are they reporting to you as far as clients and the phones ringing and getting referrals from Instagram or TikTok or one of these other platforms?
Ania:Yeah. So basically at the beginning of every kind of strategy call that we have, we say, how many leads did you get from Instagram? Generally the tracking is on contact forms and, you know, when they take intake for intake calls. But generally we're hearing all different types of things. So one of the things that we hear, you know, is, you know, a lot of people are noticing my content when I go somewhere.
Ania:And especially if it's a local firm, they'll be like, we noticed you on, on Instagram, you know, that's. That's a huge thing to, for somebody on the street or in a grocery store to recognize you from your Instagram. But most law firms want clients paying clients. Right? So for example, one of the lawyers we recently started working with, three months ago, you know, focuses on real estate, law.
Ania:But that we noticed that some people in their DMs when they were kind of asking questions, you know, were focused on, you know, questions about, I don't know, developments and architectural stuff. So, you know, the lawyer ended up booking actually a client that was an architect. So suddenly she comes back to us, the social media agency and says, by the way, when we're doing our organic engagement and reaching out, you know, and trying to find people to follow us, why don't we throw in not just, you know, realtors to work with, also architects, also home builders, you know? So it, it really is interesting how social media can also help you find different types of clients for the same services that you already offer. So we're finding people actually, you know, law firms getting business straight organically from Instagram.
Ania:If a package is $1,600 a month, let's say one of our social media management packages, you know, they can book a service for $2,000 just with one DM, right? Organically.
Davina:Let's talk about DMs for a minute, because I think that, so we're talking, everybody I assume knows what DMs are, it's when people are messaging you in the app privately, or directly for DM, for those who want to know what that means. So I can imagine a lot of lawyers who are already busy lawyers running their businesses are going, Oh my God, that's one more thing I got to keep track of. People are now sending me messages on an app that I'm on at night scrolling, drinking my glass of wine. Do you guys help with that as well? Do you have ways of automating some of that or helping with some of that?
Davina:What are some of the things that you're doing to help clients sort of manage that DM so that they're not personally on there trying to answer that?
Ania:Yeah, absolutely. So there's basically two choices when it comes to DMs. One, somebody from your forum, usually an admin professional is is on those DMs and watches for people actually reaching out about services. Or if you don't want anybody on your team to have more responsibilities, you ask us to basically send you screenshots or send you a message when there's something important in your DMs. And if it's not important, if it's just great post, I learned so much, guess what?
Ania:We can just reply to that. It doesn't have to be you.
Davina:Yeah, that's great. With my account, we also use an automatic service to get people to, for some of my freebies or even some low cost things that I'm selling, we get people who we have, you've set up something on the back end that automatically when they use a keyword or whatever, that automatically will trigger a response in the DMs for them, and we have a little chat back and forth with automation and get them where they need to go and what they want. So I mean there's all kinds of great tools. I think we're going to see more tools coming down the pipeline with AI being what it is. That's going to be very exciting for that direct conversation.
Davina:Back to my other question that I asked before I took you down a rabbit trail, which is what final thoughts do you want to leave people with in terms of thinking about their social media and why and how they should be leveraging it, particularly why should they be leveraging it? Then what might be the best way for them if you own a law firm and you want to get some help with that?
Ania:Yeah, I can say something a little bit controversial. If you don't you know, appear on social media, does your business really exist? You know, these days it's 2025.
Davina:If you didn't film it, does it even, did it even happen?
Ania:Nope. It didn't, you know? And I do feel that way because when people, you know, meet you in person, they'll ask now what's your social media. And if you're like, oh, I don't have it. Here's my website.
Ania:Here's my email.
Davina:Yeah. They're gonna like, you must be half years old.
Ania:You're a dinosaur. Right. If you don't have, you know, consistent social media these days, and it doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to be expensive. It just needs to be whatever, you know, services you provide in some professional manner. Right?
Ania:Yeah. That's, that's all it needs to be, unless you really, you know, kind of like social media, kind of like to be on video, you want to engage more people. Then I always say, go the video, right. And then hire an agency to help you just so it saves you a lot of time. But I say if you have a business that you want to gain clients, you should be on some form of social media these days.
Davina:And I would just add to that, that I don't think it's very effective to have sort of these tombstone kind of social media page where everything is a static post that somebody created from you, you know, while you give them some information, everything, every post that you have looks like an ad or answers a legal question or something like that. People are going to scroll right by those. Think about your own social media habits. If you see those, are you going, Oh wow, I have to call this law firm. No, probably not.
Davina:But if you're seeing somebody in your inbox, I will talk about this before we end just recently I was telling Anya there's somebody that sells real estate in another state and she so captivates me with the way that she talks on her videos and she's not she's very informal. She talks about why she dresses informally. She sells, you know, she's in a state that's doesn't have a large population in a town that doesn't have a large population and she really talks to the camera like she's sitting across from you talking to you And she's so compelling to watch because she's being her true self. And she's just talking about it. It makes me wanna, like, go there and buy real estate because Yep.
Davina:I'm so what I I'm not going there to buy real estate, but what I am doing is I'm commenting, I'm engaging, which is boosting her content, which is going to help get in front of other people who are going to go there and buy real estate. So you never know who might be watching, who might be looking, and where that might lead for you if you do that. I wish I were as good as she is at just kind of walking and talking, but I tend to ramble. So on that note, tell us how we can get in touch with you if we want to know more about how you can help us.
Ania:Absolutely. So reach out on Instagram. My handle is askanyamedia or our website askanyamedia.com. And we do have a special incentive today. If you are looking for social media management as a law firm, if you mentioned that you heard about us on the Wealthy Women Lawyer podcast, you know, we will waive the service fee, sorry, the setup fee for you.
Ania:So that's anywhere between $300 and $800 depending on a package. So we'll waive that for you. If you just let us know that you found us on Davina's amazing podcast.
Davina:Yay. Yay. And and we will have the link to Ask Anya Media in the show notes for Instagram and our website. For those of you who don't know how to spell Anya, ask Anya media, maybe spelled different ways in other countries or dialects or whatever. Check her out.
Davina:I highly recommend her. You can't use her so much that she can't keep working on my stuff. That's the only thing. Has to keep working on my stuff.
Ania:Never going to happen.
Davina:And if you you guys aren't following me on Instagram at Wealthy Woman Lawyer, you can go there and you can take a look at some of the work that she's done for me and then there's other clients I'm sure she could tell you about that you can go look at their stuff But I highly recommend Anya and her team which is why I wanted to have her on the podcast today. She also keeps me abreast of all that's sort of current on social media because like I said I don't I just don't have time for that and I really like having other professionals who handle that for me. So I think it's really, it's something I advise all of my private clients to do as well. Many of my private clients have become her clients, because I'm like, you guys need to stop doing this. Now, that doesn't mean that I have some clients who love it.
Davina:They've grown up doing social media, they can knock out something using a social media app in no time, and that's kind of their passion. They're all about it. And so if that's you, then that's fine. You don't need to hire somebody. But if that's not you and you're like me then you want to call Anya and her team.
Davina:All right thanks for being here I've enjoyed a conversation as I always do with you.
Ania:Thanks so much, and
Davina:that was as close as you get to me dancing on social media.
Ania:I got you dancing. Yay.
Davina:All right. Thanks, Anja, for being here. I've enjoyed our conversation.
Ania:Thanks, Divina.
Intro:If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.
