The Five Best Twitter Tips for Lawyers

Does the thought of using Twitter send chills down your spine? If it does, but you’re still intrigued by its ability to build brand familiarity, recognition, and voice, then you’re in the right place. The Twitter-sphere is a complicated place to understand fully. Your tweets simultaneously show up alongside national competitors and small businesses, and there are thousands of people vying for the attention of your potential customers. The important thing to remember is that if you’re not tweeting, your competitors are. So you might as well get in the game. The following Twitter tips for lawyers will focus on creating a recognizable, thought-leadership based brand while maintaining the integrity and trust that is so crucial to generating your ideal customer.

The Best Twitter Tips for Lawyers

Define Your Personal Brand

Even if you work for a firm, your Twitter account is all about your personal brand. Are you the sarcastic but funny lawyer? The nerdy lawyer? Or the tough-as-nails lawyer?

Defining your personal brand is important because this is what your followers will immediately think of when they see your name. For example, Jim Adler, “the Texas Hammer,” has done an impeccable job defining his personal brand. If you live in Texas, you can’t see or hear his name without thinking of a strong personality that takes no flack while fighting for the little guy.

Your brand doesn’t have to be set-in-stone from the get-go. But having a rough idea will help you get started by providing guidelines for the type of content you post. After all, every time someone reads one of your tweets, they see your name and brand. Building on those impressions over time will allow you to eventually host a brand that is as solid as Jim Adler’s.  

Repurpose Content 

Many lawyers are less excited about the idea of tweeting because they associate the platform with mindless quips and political arguments. While that may be one small part of the larger platform, most professional Twitter accounts use their tweets to post content that promotes thought-leadership. This can be original thoughts, or you can repurpose content from your law firm, followers, and other leaders in the industry.

•  If your law firm has published regularly to a blog in the past few years, you can retweet or repost them to your personal account. 
• Pay attention to trending interests. What are your followers talking about? Provide thoughts, opinions, or guidance on the subject.
• Take advantage of hot news stories. If a major celebrity was just charged with a DUI, enter the conversation by posting an article about your law firm’s approach to alcohol laws in your state.

As mentioned, professional lawyer Twitter accounts are less about posting the funniest quip and more about entering the ongoing conversations. In just a few words, you can provide your thoughts on topics your followers are already invested in. Over time, consumers will visit your profile just to see what you have to say. That’s when you know you’ve made it! However, in the time leading up to that, you’ll need to insert your personal brand in the middle of larger conversations. The longer you remain immersed in these conversations, the longer you remain relevant.

Gain Followers by Following Others

One of the hardest things about creating a Twitter profile is finding out who to follow. While yes, you want to secure as many of your own followers as possible, the first step is to find thought-leadership accounts to follow. This allows you to interact with the platform in the first place. As you follow other accounts, you’ll likely get automatic follows from the brand itself.

A super easy way to find accounts is to use Tweepi, a streamlined Twitter management app that can help you quickly learn how to interact with the platform. Tweepi uses artificial intelligence to find active users that are following your competitors or target accounts. Our favorite part of this tool is that you can narrow in on a geo-location of interest. 

Why is this great for lawyers?? 

Because your potential customers live in a small area! A personal injury case from Maine isn’t going to use a lawyer located in California. By focusing on the accounts that live in your city or state, you actively engage with the people most likely to become customers.

Post When Your Audience is Active

To create a thought-leadership-based brand (and generate new customers), it’s essential that the Twitterverse knows you exist. While this may seem obvious, many businesses make the mistake of posting content at all hours of the day rather than using a strategy.

Tweriod allows you to input your handle (username) and run a report that looks at when your followers are most active online, so you can post when they’re paying the most attention. The tool will offer you a handful of timeframes to post between, and then all you have to do is make sure you’re taking advantage of them. It would be impossible to process this information on your own since so many users scroll invisibly or just silently like posts for most of the time they’re online. Gauging activity simply through the timestamped posts you see is inevitably inaccurate, so it’s important to take advantage of tools like this.

Once you know when your audience is active, you can use Twitter’s native scheduling tools to plan ahead. It’s recommended to post on Twitter at least once a day. I know, I know. That may seem like a lot. But with the ability to schedule posts in advance, you could easily knock out a week’s worth of posts in about an hour. This will free up your time to capitalize on trends and news stories as they pop-up each day. This mix of planned content and hot topics will keep your account fresh and top-of-mind with your audience.

Build Brand Recognition Offline

Cross-promoting your business through digital and print mediums can increase the impact of each effort. Luckily, these Twitter tips for lawyers apply to building your brand offline, as well.  Through shopping cart advertising, you can define your brand, repurpose existing content, and stay top-of-mind with your most likely customers.

The shopping carts at your local grocery store act as a mini-billboard. You can display a large print ad from your law firm and build a community-centric brand. As customers return to the store each week, they’ll see your supermarket advertisement over and over again, which means you can quickly build brand recognition and Twitter followers. This combination of repetition and local-targeting allows grocery store advertising to remain one of the most reliable and effective ways to advertise.