Today, I want to talk to you about something that is super cool. It’s the amazing power of social media. Sometimes, my videos are a little more theoretical and philosophical.
But, this is an actual video where I want to tell you a story about how we used social media to get my client some cases immediately. If you use social media in this way, you can really do a lot of damage and outsmart your competition.
The Incident That Started It All
About two years ago, there were two train crashes. One was in Long Island, New York, and I believe the other one was in Brooklyn, New York.
I remember I was sitting in my office at nine o’clock in the morning, and my phone rang. It was my client, a personal injury attorney up in Manhattan. He was panicked because there was a train crash.
He said, “we’ve got to figure out how to get into this area and do search engine optimization to get some of these victims to hire us.” He was thinking let’s do some SEO. Of course, that’s not going to work.
Why SEO Won’t Work
You can’t have an event that’s unfolding and immediately think that you’re going to outrank all the news articles that are popping up. It’s just not going to happen. In New York, there are major publications like CNN, NBC News, and MSNBC that are covering it, and you’re not going to outrank them.
You’re also not going to outrank the local affiliate stations or the New York Post and the New York Times. So what do you do? How do you get in front of the types of people that you know might be likely to hire you for some of these cases?
What We Did instead
So here’s what we did. I told him that I need you to pull out your phone and I need you to quickly record a video, giving your opinion about the crash. I don’t know how much you know about these crashes, but apparently, there’s some sort of braking system that is federally mandated to be on all of the trains nationwide.
Apparently, it wasn’t on either of these trains. The two times this happened, we talked about is how this train crash should have never occurred because the train should have had this automatic braking system.
When it approaches a curve, it was going too fast. The system would have automatically slowed the train down. It didn’t have that, and that’s what caused the crash.
The Targeted Facebook Ad
I told him to give me videos on the crash, but not to make it a sales pitch. Instead, give your opinion and talk about maybe some of the other train crashes that you’ve been involved in.
He gave his opinion on the crash, then his credibility, and sent me the video. We spent about $1,000, went to Facebook, and dropped a pin.
On Facebook, there’s a section when you do your targeting that says people that have been in this location. I went to Facebook and found the exact location of the crash. I also selected people that have been in this location within the last seven days.
Anyone that’s been at that location within the last seven days is now going to see that ad. Especially if they’re playing on their phones, and usually when there’s some event, people are on their phones. They’re taking pictures, they’re tweeting about it, and they’re posting on Facebook.
What we did is we served the ads only to people that were in that location within the last seven days, which means everyone that was in that train crash. Anyone that went to that location who had a family member or a friend or anyone that was in the train crash would also see that ad for the next seven days.
It was an ad, but it was technically not an ad. It was a video talking about his opinion on the train crash. What ended up happening was we spent about $1000. We did it for one day, and he got a few cases out of it.
Why It Worked
It worked because we were able to create content very quickly. We didn’t have to write a blog post or have a full production team. We didn’t have anything like that. He literally just pulled out his phone, recorded a video, sent it to me, uploaded it to Facebook, created an ad, and hit run.
What You Can Do
That’s the power of social media and how amazing it is right now. You can take advantage of unfolding news events as they’re happening with things like that. If there’s a train crash, a big car pileup, or whatever it is, pull out your phone, record your opinion on it, throw a couple of hundred dollars at it and blanket the area everywhere.
You need to target everyone that’s been in that area within the last seven days. You’ll probably get some people that have been affected by whatever’s happening, and maybe even some cases out of it.
This guy got a lot of phone calls and a few cases, so you’ll at least get some, phone calls and some opportunities to close some people.
I’ve also done this with other clients before that have called me in a panic when things like this occur. I tell them that we need to take advantage of this and give them the same strategy every single time.
Some of them have done it and gotten cases, whereas some just haven’t done it for whatever reason. What that tells me is that there are a lot of people out there that will not take advantage of this type of exposure, even though it’s so easy. Just pull out your phone, give your opinion, and run the ad.
That’s all you have to do. I hope that it’ll give you some inspiration, where you can put yourself right in front of the current event and get clients that way.