Foreword by Jacob Malherbe

IN THE WORLD OF legal advertising, time is the enemy. A minute wasted is a potential client lost. Every precious ad dollar allocated to the wrong platform that reaches the wrong audience guarantees only one thing: that a rival firm will gain a client that should have been yours. The truth of the matter is that speed does matter. In the amount of time it takes a firm to create and mount a billboard or produce and secure a time slot for expensive TV ads, potential viewers will have swiped their way through their Facebook feeds thousands of times. And yet there are other equally important variables to consider. Are you advertising on the right platforms? Are your ads reaching the right audience? Are you spending the right amount of money per lead—and per case? And, most importantly, are your ads directly translating into new clients?

If the golden rule of the legal industry has always been to follow your clients wherever they might go, then the guiding maxim of the advertising world has been equally straightforward: go where the eyeballs are. In today’s world, your clients—and most of the world’s eyeballs, for that matter—aren’t spending the majority of their time reading magazines, glancing at billboards, or even watching TV. What they’re doing, en masse, is staring at the portable, custom­izable TVs that they carry around in their pockets and their purses— their smartphones. And where are they spending the majority of their time on their smartphones? One place: Facebook.

Today, there are more than two hundred million active Facebook users in the United States, with an estimated increase of 23 percent per year across the globe going forward. These aren’t casual users. They’re engaged followers.

Recent analysis shows that one out of every five minutes spent on a mobile device is spent on Facebook. What many lawyers—and members of the general public, for that matter—don’t realize is that Facebook’s survival is predicated almost entirely on advertising. Currently, 98 percent of Facebook’s revenues stem from advertising, a stunning percentage made possible by Facebook’s unique ability to deliver targeted ads to users who will be most interested in advertisers’ products or services.

Therefore, if you’re under the impression that Facebook is a social media platform, a means for keeping in touch with family members and old law school friends, you’re only fractionally correct. If anything, Facebook, at its core, is a delivery system for dis­seminating real-time advertisements to the right people. And if you’re a lawyer, it also happens to be the single greatest marketing tool ever created.