Tweeting for lawyers – part two

As I set out previously, there are three main potential benefits of Twitter to businesses and individuals:

• Listening and research.
• Sharing information.
• Networking, building relationships and communities.

The last of these three has the greatest potential, helping you to shrink the emotional distance between your firm and its followers. However, there are risks and if you do not have anyone suitable to tweet within your firm or if your clients are traditionalists who view enterprise 2.0 with suspicion, you may be wasting time and money by tweeting. Whether Twitter could help your firm or your lawyers depends upon you, your clients, your brand and your business objectives. If you are uncertain as to whether Twitter is for you, click here to link to my previous article.

Identifying goals

Twitter, as with many 2.0 enterprise tools, runs the risk of being a time waster unless you decide upon a strategy for its use first. If Twitter is for you, start by spending some time thinking about the goals you are trying to achieve by using it. Start by asking yourself the following questions:

1) Who will be tweeting?

• Your firm?
• A particular department within a firm?
• Your lawyers as individual ambassadors for the firm?

2) What are you trying to achieve?

• Are you trying to build expertise in a particular niche?
• Are you trying to send out information your clients will find useful as quickly as possible?
• Are you trying to build personal relationships between your lawyers and potential clients, to be their trusted adviser of choice?
• Are you trying to get more traffic to your website?

Choose a couple of key goals and use these to dictate the nature of your posts. Don't get side-tracked into a goal of 'getting more followers'. You only need followers who can help you to achieve your goals.

Who will be tweeting?

When you have decided upon your goals, you need firstly to decide who will actually be writing the tweets. If you plan to have one account for your firm, it may be tempting to delegate this task to one of the youngest members of staff, but this is rarely the best option. If you are simply using the feed as a kind of RSS feed, your IT department can probably identify a suitable third party tool. There are many tools which can coordinate updates to Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. If you are pushing a mix of marketing, client-facing know how and trying to build a relationship through conversation, a professional support lawyer, if you have one, would be ideal. If you are primarily relationship building or showcasing expertise, you may want to choose an appropriate rising star lawyer. Whoever you choose needs to have an easy, engaging style, with a love of language and the ability to write short, pithy posts. It needs to be someone you trust completely and they need to understand your firm's brand and Twitter strategy, as they have your brand in their hands. If you can, try to have more than one twitterer at your firm: people take holidays and quit, and sometimes it is nice for the audience to have a bit of variety.

Promoting your brand and strategy

Once you have identified your twitterer, you need to ensure your tweets promote your brand and your twitter strategy. Twitter is a recipient-controlled model, which means that if you are posting interesting messages, people will view your updates, but, if not, it is easy for them to 'un-follow' you. Successful feeds can take different forms and the intended audience dictates the style. You may want to have a number of different feeds for different purposes: retailers often have one feed for vouchers and a different one for customer care/relationship-building, you may want to have different feeds for different practice areas.

There is no perfect recipe for successful tweeting, but these are my tips:

1) Listening

a. Start by listening. Study your audience, your competitors and those whose tweets you enjoy, but don't feel you have to read every tweet otherwise you will soon be overloaded.

b. Listen especially to your critics. Third party applications can email an alert to you when someone tweets about you or any keyword or URL you choose and Twitter Search will make sure you see if someone is talking about you or your firm.

c. When you start tweeting, continue to listen and join in relevant discussions.

d. Always answer questions directed to you.

2) Post a balanced number of tweets

a. Recommendations as to a maximum vary, but personally I recommend no more than four a day. Your audience will be impressed by quality not quantity.

b. Most professionals I know are more likely to un-follow if you tweet too much rather than too little, but do try to tweet at least one message each week.

3) Provide value to your followers

a. Don't write anything you wouldn't want to read. Be thought-provoking, pithy, interesting and engaging.

b. Twitter works best for conversations, not just as an RSS feed or for press releases.

c. The best self-promotion is subtle and interesting.

d. Promote other people and re-tweet interesting people more than you promote yourself.

e. Share links with a discussion point or explanation as to why it is interesting.

f. Minimise the 'noise'. You want to shrink the emotional distance between you and your clients, but do they want to hear that you are having coffee again?

g. Keep private messages private and just send a public tweet when it is of interest to many of your followers.

4) Automatic direct messages may save time but do little to build relationships or help you to connect with your followers.

Keeping track

Lastly, you should check whether Twitter is providing an adequate return on the time you have invested. There are a number of quantitative and qualitative measurements you could use to measure the success or otherwise of twittering. In relation to quantitative measurements, you could watch the tally of questions answered, problems resolved, positive exchanges and review whether the percentage is improving. You could track traffic to your website from Twitter or track click-throughs from the links you post on your tweets to check whether you are interesting and engaging people, and you could check whether people continue to follow you after a period of time. In relation to qualitative measurements, you could simply ask your followers how you are doing. Some companies have found that the communities they have built are actually quite keen to give them feedback and help them build better products and services.

Twitter certainly has much to offer businesses, but whether Twitter is for right for your firm or your lawyers will depend on your firm's brand, its business strategy and your market. It is easy and free, so why not at least try it?