Should I Follow Other Lawyers on Twitter?

I go out of my way to follow other Lawyers, not only because they tend to be interesting but for marketing reasons.

People worry about following other lawyers on Twitter, worried about giving away tips, ideas etc. I can understand that but I don’t think we need to worry about competing on twitter, for a start there aren’t that many of us from the UK on Twitter.

Following other lawyers can be a great source of work.

Take my ideal client, where is the best place to find them? Where will I get the most referrals from? Where do most people with motoring law problems go? – Other solicitors. Most people I speak to on twitter don’t do motoring law and we can refer clients to each other. Even other motoring lawyers refer clients to each other, unless they are in the same line of work in the same location then they are not competitors but collaborators.

I also learn a lot from other lawyers about how to market, keep up with the law and sometimes bounce ideas around.

I follow all UK Lawyers I can, with one exception, a motoring lawyer in the same location as me who copied everything I did, you probably know who you are and no I didn’t disappear from Twitter I just blocked you.

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How to make every tweet a sales pitch without annoying people.

I like Twitter, but as a marketing platform it has it’s problems. Not least the fact that it is so transient. Most people follow a few hundred people and pop on for a few minutes throughout the day. They maybe scan the last 100 or so tweets. Having already established that I believe there should be a mixture of marketing type messages and more personal messages what is the chance of someone seeing your ‘sales pitch’ when they are scanning through the last 100 tweets?

You only get 140 characters on twitter so there is not room to add your website/company name/job role at the end of every tweet so add it at the beginning.

In fact put it in big bold letters at the side too, every time.

Your twitter name can be your sales pitch.

People know what I do, my twitter name is MotoringLawyer.

I can talk about the football, the weather or the latest scandal and people know I do Motoring Law. When people re-tweet my slightly humorous tweets about football their followers know what I do too.

Does Bloggs&CoLawyers as a twitter name take it much further? I don’t think so, sure people know you are a lawyer but they probably follow a few lawyers.

What separates you?

What do you DO?

NorthEastConveyancer tells people what you do and where, and it’s available 😉

Which Law Firm Ranks Top For Use Of Twitter?

Be prepared for a shock, you might not have guessed it and after reading how they came to the decision you wont believe it (nor should you!)

Intendance, a ‘Digital Web Agency’ decided to do  a report ‘an overview of Twitter use in the UK Legal Sector’

I think this was a good opportunity to have an insight into twitter use by UK Lawyers but I think it was a missed opportunity. Intendance limited the survey to the top 50 firms and asked whether they had an account and then reviewed it.

After using hubspot to analyse the accounts the top firms were listed.

Allen & Overy came top – they have 2794 followers and have tweeted 204 times,  Withers were 4th with 688 – 299 tweets, the last on 5th January and before that on 24th November.  Clifford Chance sneaked into the top 5 with 79 tweets!

The conclusion is that ‘The survey shows that Twitter has permeated the legal sector to a significant degree’ and”These statistics tell us that the balance has tipped undoubtedly in favour of Twitter, to the extent that it is now an accepted constituent of the modern marketing mix’??? What statistics? That Clifford Chance have tweeted 79 times?

What does it take to get into the top 10 on this survey? Well the 10th spot goes to Norton Rosehttp://twitter.com/#!/NortonRoseGroup who have 455 followers. You may wonder why they have that many since they have never actually sent a tweet!

Surely as soon as you see a firm in 10th position in terms of ‘Quality of Twitter account’ with no tweets at all that must say that the whole grading exercise is a joke. I would be embarrassed to put my name to this survey.

What this survey shows is that the big law firms do not use twitter to any extent at all, they don’t network, they don’t contribute and in some cases they do not tweet at all!

 

Chris Brogan On How Quora Could Get Interesting

Quora seems to be the new kid on the block at the moment, appears to have hit that critical point where a lot of people are looking into it and wondering whether it is worthwhile investing time in.

Chris Brogan raises an interesting view – http://www.chrisbrogan.com/how-quora-could-get-interesting/

It would be interesting as Chris suggests to interview fascinating people quiz them about their life, views etc.

In terms of marketing for lawyers I’m not convinced of it’s value, like a few other UK lawyers I have dipped my toe in but haven’t yet worked out a marketing angle on it.

In my experience most people asking for legal advice on forums are not prepared to pay for legal advice. It might raise your social media profile but at the moment it’s not one I am going to invest a lot of time in.

 

When Should I Promote Myself On Twitter?

So you’ve taken the plunge, set up your account. Now what do you say and why would anyone want to listen to you anyway?

Twitter is much like a networking group that meets up regularly, if you are on twitter for marketing purposes you will want to make people aware of what you do. This is where so many get it wrong.

No one likes the guy who goes from group to group passing out his business cards and it’s not good networking either. Those business cards? They all end up in the bin eventually.

On Twitter, just like at networking events you have to get the balance right. There is nothing wrong with pitching but you have to be selective. On twitter I would suggest that you do a ‘marketing’ tweet when you have something to say, a new blog post,  a new member of staff, a recent case you have won/been involved in.

Don’t pitch for the sake of it. If you don’t have anything to say, listen. Re tweet other peoples interesting tweets, comment on other peoples tweets and join in conversations.

Don’t mistake lots of tweets for influence, it might get you noticed but so does wearing a novelty tie, it doesn’t mean it’s good.

Why Social Media, Why This Blog?

I am a Motoring Lawyer by day and run Motoring Lawyers Online. As the name suggests all of the marketing and advertising is done online. I started this firm in 2009, my passion was to run an law firm taking advantage of Social Media. By that I mean places like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Ecademy etc. All of these are places where you can share ideas, learn and from a marketing point of view, be seen.

Traditional lawyers were/are against any form of social media, in the firm where I was a partner before setting up my own practice Facebook was banned and most people hadn’t heard of twitter or if they had they didn’t ‘get it’

I was convinced that there was a place for social media for lawyers and the last 18 months have proved that to be correct. I have met with some fascinating lawyers who use social media very well, learnt a lot and even gained clients from social media. I have also come across some awful examples of people jumping on the social media band wagon and just not getting it at all.

I want to use this place to give my own views on social media and how it can work for lawyers.

For me Social Media for Lawyers, or anyone else is not about advertising, yes it can be about marketing but not advertising. Social media is not about broadcasting, it is not about spamming messages offering services nor is it about auto tweeting the same message throughout the day.

Advertising is one sided, the advertiser advertises and the reader reads, except they don’t, not any more. No one reads or listens to adverts. At the moment there is a very good TV advert showing a flash mob at an airport singing to passengers as they exit. The 2 sings I have seen are ‘return of the mac’ and ‘ the boys are back in town’. I love watching the expressions of the ‘victims’, they are cool adverts well designed, except for one thing…… I couldn’t tell you who they are advertising.

I get around 150 emails a day, mainly spam, I assume the majority are spam and  I read the first line of the ones that make it past my spam detector. Normally that is enough to be send to the trash folder. Obviously the ones that tear at my heart strings with a plea to help them release $15,000,000 in return for 10% I read more carefully, after all who would turn down an offer like that?!

The point is there is so much noise, so much crap that we have stopped listening, stopped reading and the only people that advertising works for is the people getting paid to sell advertising.

Done properly Social media is not advertising, it is not one sided. That simply doesn’t work. If your aim in social media is to tell and sell you are not doing it properly and are wasting your time.

Social Media is about interaction, it is two sided, it is about building a relationship where the aim is no more than that. Simply building a relationship, one day you may be able to help that person, one day they may be able to help you, but if you start off with the aim of creating a business deal you will fail, people will see through that and you will be added to the noise or worse still the spam.