The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic.
Of course, you don’t find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals.
So, you might decide to game the system.
As I’m writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement.
This takes many forms, I’m going to focus on artificial engagement on social media.
Put simply, lawyers will enter into quid pro quo engagement pods.
“You like, comment, and share my stuff, I’ll do the same for you.”
Or the more nefarious, “I’ll just pay you to generate a lot of engagement on my posts.”
Which often ends up leading to hundreds or thousands of likes, comments, and shares from fake or bot accounts.
The idea is that it makes the lawyer look authoritative. “Hey, look at me, I have thousands of people liking and commenting on my posts.”
There is also a belief that engagement will improve visibility because algorithms are trained to reward engagement. There’s truth to this, but is it worth it?
You see, anyone that looks at these comments, and the profiles that are creating them, can usually quickly see what’s going on.
Many of the comments are completely out of context and don’t make any sense at all with respect to the original post.
Many of the profiles are clearly fake, lacking any signal of being a real person.
This compromises the poster’s authenticity.
Sure, maybe it improves their reach or awareness.
But awareness isn’t as valuable as affinity.
Knowing someone isn’t the same as liking and trusting them.
Don’t compromise your authenticity.
People know.
And they’re unlikely to ever tell you that they know.
