Twitter Is A Marketing Savvy Lawyer's Best Friend
Twitter makes it easy to network with other lawyers across the country while building your firm's social footprint at the same time. Keep up to date with all of the industry relevant news and connect with potential clients all on one user-friendly platform. Sounds great right?
It is – if you have a plan in place to leverage the incredible reach of Twitter and take your firm to the next level. We reached out to some of the top Twitter marketing experts in the industy and the 12 we selected below have agreed to share what works for them and will work for you. Tweet away…
1. Use Twitter Search for Q&A Opportunities
“If you're a Lawyer and you want to get the most from Twitter, the best piece of advice is to be active on the platform. You can do this a number of ways. For example, use search.twitter.com to locate people who have questions and reply back to them with helpful answers or links to articles that help address the issue that they may be having.
Another way that lawyer's can get the most out of Twitter is to partner up with other lawyer's and host your own ‘Tweetchat‘ where you give advice on a particular topic. This can be a great way to showcase your knowledge to potential clients who are looking to hire a lawyer.”
By Christian Karasiewicz of Social Chefs
2. Twitter Covers Both B2B and B2C Audiences
“While LinkedIn is widely regarded as a B2B marketing platform and Facebook more of a B2C, Twitter straddles both realms. Individual attorneys should work on building their following and influence through professional networking. The practice as a whole can focus on a longer-term branding strategy, such as referral marketing. It's not likely that someone is going to use Twitter to find an attorney in an emergency situation, say a car accident, severe injury or criminal case, but it might be possible to get new clients for other practice areas such as family law or mass torts, which entail a longer phase of research and information gathering. If you work to build a strong Twitter presence, you increase the chances that, if and when someone does need a lawyer, you'll be the first one that they think of.”
By Daniel Brophy of Page 1 Solutions, LLC
3. Play Up The Personal Aspect of Twitter Engagement
“Lawyers should approach Twitter in a way that humanizes the firm, engages their local or online communities and builds an audience. Sure, law firms can use Twitter to promote their brand and services, but the return on their time will be minimal. Twitter followers want to connect with real human beings that share their interests.
So if you work with entrepreneurs, tweet about entrepreneurship. If you're a personal injury lawyer who works with motorcycle accidents, engage with with biking communities on the platform. Bonus points go to the lawyers that use a headshot instead of a logo for the profile pic.”
By Tyler Roberts of NOMOS Marketing
4. Reach Out to Media Experts
“Anytime we feel that we have newsworthy information we want to get out to the masses we connect with news anchors and journalist via Twitter. The vast majority of news is distributed through Twitter and most journalist do a good job of engaging on the platform. Simply, this may consist of mentions or direct messages depending on our relationship with the journalist and the story.Sutliff & Stout has received solid media coverage with our community initiatives and research articles by reaching out to media experts on Twitter.”
By Michelle Ngome of Sutliff & Stout, PLLC
5. A Little Fun Never Hurt Anyone
“BE FUN on Twitter! One of my clients uses GIFs to punch up her social shares to rather boring legal blog posts and articles. So if we're sharing a resource on the FEC's interactions with federal contractors, we usually throw in a GIF from, I don't know, say Scrooge McDuck counting his coins. I also encourage legal tweeters to engage with other legal accounts. Lawyers love to chat, so why not do it in the Twittersphere as well!”
By Charlie Heck of Checkmark Creative
6. Proper Twitter Targeting Can Be Very Powerful
“Twitter can be an incredibly powerful platform for lawyers if they're able to take a step back, put themselves in the mindset of their clients, and then cleverly utilize many of the paid advertising targeting options that Twitter has available. For instance, Twitter lets you target the followers of specific people. If you're an M&A lawyer it may make sense to advertise to people that follow prominent venture capitalists. Another targeting option Twitter has is the ability to Target based on keywords. If you're a personal injury attorney it may make sense to target based on things such as ‘Whiplash' ‘car accident' ‘rear ended' and more. There are many more paid advertising options available for Twitter than most people realize, and many of them are quite useful, but the biggest thing is to guide your targeting with as much empathy as possible for your clients.”
By Jeromy Sonne of FirmFuel
7. Friendly & Timely Engagement
“Engagement is key! When you get a new follower, tweet them a quick “Thank you” and encourage them to reach out to your company with any legal questions they may have. Reply to tweets mentioning your law firm. Retweet relevant tweets from your followers. Just be authentic in your engagement, that is what users like to see.”
By Briana Marie of Tanzek Media
8. Google & Twitter Work Hand-In-Hand
“The most important benefit of using Twitter: driving traffic back to your website and boosting SEO. Google and Twitter actually have a strong partnership, meaning that Google has permission to index tweets in its search results. To use this to their advantage, lawyers can do three things: 1) automatically share their blog posts on Google 2) share their evergreen content and 3) optimize their Twitter bio to include keywords. Lawyers should want to drive people back to their website because they have full control over the content of their website, they can allow their website visitors to learn more about them, they can provide more value, and they can eventually convert website visitors to become leads.”
By Ashley Mason of Dash of Social
9. Follow The Trend
“Train your eyes to look for trending topics and hashtags – and then act on them! Fortunately for lawyers, Twitter is the one social media platform that is consistently booming with legal news and government updates. So finding a conversation to input your expertise shouldn’t come at too much of a hassle. Use the ”Hashtag Trends” section of Twitter to discover trending topics based off your geographic area, then start engaging! This gets your name out as well as your knowledge on the subject. The best part? It won’t cost you a dime.”
By Alexa Kurtz of WebTek
10. Keep It In-House and Be Professional Above All
“There are some ‘do's' and ‘don'ts' of using Twitter to market a law firm. First, don't hire an outside consultant to Tweet on the behalf of the law firm. A Twitter account should not be effectively outsourced to a newly minted 21 year old marketing major. Second, do not fail to consider ethical and professional reputational risk of using Twitter. A law firm should consider whether vapid Tweets will more or less likely to ingratiate oneself to the legal community. If it's the latter, then maybe think twice about sending that Tweet. A Twitter account should be used to follow people with common interests and be judicious in who you follow and judicious in when to participate. Make sure the Twitter account is used in a professional and dignified manner.”
By David Reischer, Esq. of LegalAdvice.com
11. Be Consistent
“Consistency is key, make sure that you are posting in a consistent manner that allows for optimum coverage at peak times. This will mean that your followers are expecting you to post a tweet at that time when they look at their feed.
Using your own hashtag is simple, it acts as a sort of keyword so that prospective clients can find you easily, implementing these will also increase the coverage of your target audience.
Making sure that you engage with your audience is an overlooked element to social media marketing. These platforms make it easy for you to reply to them and in doing so you could save yourself from a bad review.”
By Charlie Worrall of Imaginaire Digital
12. One-On-One Interactions
“The understated beauty of Twitter is how easy it is to have one-on-one interactions with people. Instead of automating everything, force yourself to interact with followers and fellow legal professionals every day. Try to have a daily goal to spark a conversation with at least three different people on Twitter. You can try by thanking new followers, replying to Tweets, or providing commentary on articles written by other legal professionals you respect. The idea is to be more human and genuine.”
By Stephen Hoops of Direct Online Marketing
