If a car jumps the median into your lane, you need to act instantly to avoid a life-threatening collision.
Many legal marketing gurus would have you believe that you must act just as quickly to embrace Twitter, the leading micro-blogging platform. Don't believe them. Your law firm won't disappear tomorrow if you don't start tweeting today.
While I don't recommend taking a few years to think about how to incorporate Twitter into your marketing plan, giving it some serious thought before diving in will benefit rather than hurt you.
Below you'll find three ways to get started with Twitter, none of which require a serious investment of time or pose any risk. I also point out a few pitfalls to avoid.
1. Search for Real-Time Competitive Intelligence (Spying)
People can't help themselves — especially those who grew up with instant messaging (IM). Twitter is a lot like IM except that it's public (you can create a private account but most people don't).
Before you read another sentence, bookmark Twitter Search.
Start searching it on behalf of yourself and your clients to monitor people, companies, and other keywords you care about. At the very least, you'll find it interesting plus you may hit the jackpot and learn about a competitor's strategies or possible legal work for existing clients (e.g., infringement). You may even find someone seeking legal services in your field. Using Twitter Search for spying monitoring keywords doesn't require an account.
Unfortunately, Twitter does not make its complete archive searchable. In fact, it only goes back a day or so. However, Google archives Twitter — sort of. If you save your Twitter searches as RSS feeds, and then place those feeds in Google Reader, you can build your own archive of tweets that never disappear.
If you start tweeting someday, don't make the same mistake many others do. Think twice before tweeting about your personal life or your law firm's finances, strategic planning, etc.
2. Start Tweeting With Direct (Private) Messages
When you start searching Twitter, you'll find a lot of "replies to nowhere." Much like that famous bridge to nowhere, which stood to benefit just a few dozen people, these replies are essentially directed at one person or at most a small group of people so they don't make much sense to anyone else. It's like hearing the punch line of a joke without hearing the setup.
Inevitably, you'll come across a tweet and want to reply to the author. Try replying to these tweets privately rather than publicly to prevent cluttering up your stream with replies to nowhere, especially if you have not yet started publicly tweeting or if your reply is unrelated to the topics you typically tweet about.
To contact someone privately, use a Direct Message as opposed to a public @reply. However, you can only send a direct message to someone who follows you — a spam prevention measure that creates a catch-22.
But don't despair. Unless you're trying to contact a celebrity, if you follow the person you want to contact they will usually return the favor and follow you, after which you can direct message them. If they don't reciprocate, try searching Google, LinkedIn, etc. for their email address. If all else fails, you can use an @reply, and later delete it once you've established a dialogue.
3. Tweet Your Blog Posts and Retweet Related Tweets
Because the foregoing activities don't involve public tweets, they pose no risk. If you want to start posting publicly so that you can attract followers and network on a larger scale, the tips below will safely get you started.
If your firm publishes a blog, you can start tweeting immediately. Most blog platforms integrate with Twitter (see, e.g., TypePad, which we use). Once configured, every time you publish a new article in your blog, you can automatically post the title and corresponding link to your Twitter stream. In other words, you can tweet and generate traffic to your blog with zero effort.
You should also consider Retweets — reprinting relevant tweets by other Twitter users. Originally created by Twitter users through a simple copy and paste preceded by the letters RT and the original author's Twitter name, retweeting has become such a phenomenon that Twitter recently unveiled its official retweeting tool.
Retweeting dovetails nicely with searching Twitter for keywords, and tends to attract followers. For example, suppose you want to focus on trademark issues. Every day, you search Twitter for "trademark" and other related keywords. Invariably, you'll find some interesting tweets, perhaps pointing an article somewhere on the Web. Rather than tweet about that same article yourself, you could quickly retweet it instead.
Publishers such as AllTop and Huffington Post have amassed large audiences aggregating the related content of others into one convenient location. Aggregation works just as well on Twitter
Twitter has not (yet) addressed the copyright issues surrounding retweets in its terms of service, but given that an official tool now exists, I suspect Twitter will require all users to permit retweets (Twitter enables you to block the retweets of those you follow, but you cannot prevent people from retweeting your tweets).
Beyond these two starting points, treat your Twitter stream as you would any publication — stick to a theme. This disciplined approach will not only attract a larger audience than a random stream of non-sequiturs, but also attract the kind of people with whom you want to connect. Also, you can still have fun and showcase your personality. Most topics have their lighter side, plus your tweets will hopefully spark some lively debates. Just stay away from listing what you ate for dinner. Few people care about that stuff — unless perhaps you dined with Jennifer Aniston and Ashton Kutcher at Per Se.
Follow Up
You now know a lot more about Twitter than you did a few minutes ago — enough to get started. You may also want to read Twitter 101, Twitter's guide for businesses. Just one more thing. While we welcome you to follow us, we encourage you to join us.
Originally published October 26, 2009. Updated to include Twitter's new retweet tool.
About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to lawyers, law office administrators, and others in the legal profession. We link to each new TechnoEditorial and much more in our BlawgWorld newsletter, which is free. Please subscribe now.
