There is a growing misconception in the legal marketing industry that social networks are becoming more important than creating new content. However, this is not the case at all. Social networks are powered by content.

What is changing is the content itself. Whereas the online marketing strategies of the past involved producing a lot of long, extensive articles and content pieces, the new law firm marketing strategy is about more, shorter pieces of content. But this presents challenges of its own.

To keep social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest relevant, law firms need to post interesting comments and links. Otherwise, those profiles become just another advertisement rather than a community.

At the same time, if a law firm posts links to brief pieces of content that are worthless or too abridged to provide any real information, then those social network profiles are essentially spam. They will not lead to new cases, but instead will discourage prospects from reading anything that comes from that firm.

The new role for content is to be short but dense. Pack as much useful information as possible in a brief 200-300 word blog post. It's short but it's interesting and helpful. Those blog posts then get linked and plugged on your social network profiles and drive traffic back to your law firm's website.

So content's new role in legal marketing is to be more informative in fewer words and be released more frequently. It's how law firms are going to get bigger now and in the near future.