Can Twitter Help Build Your Law Practice?

What are some good strategies for deploying social media to boost your practice? I think the most important, and effective, is to use social media very similarly to the way you would use personal networking. Think of social media as the gateway to massive, ongoing personal networking opportunities ... leveraging your time and talent by reaching more people, more quickly, and by "archiving" your most poignant comments for all to read (unlike the time you made a great point in a conversation with one person at the local bar association lunch-n-learn).

 

If you are skeptical about the usefulness of social media, consider this demographic data about Twitter users, just in from Anderson Analytics (reported in Advertising Age today):

Twitterers
This is the super-user group. Twitterers are more interested than the others in many subjects but skew particularly high in all news categories, restaurants, sports, politics, personal finance and religion. They also especially like pop culture, with music, movies, TV and reading, ranking higher than average. And their buying habits mirror that. They're more likely to buy books, movies, shoes and cosmetics online than the other groups.

Twitterers are also entrepreneurial. They are more likely than others to use the service to promote their blogs or businesses. How do they keep going? Coffee, apparently. Some 31% buy coffee online, far above the average 21% of other social networkers.

The added emphasis is mine -- Twitterers are interested in personal finance, and they tend to be entrepreneurial. Sounds like a target-rich environment.

A Caveat About Social Media: You won't get very far with just a few 140-character "tweets" or a facebook page. You will need a compelling, impressing, engaging and relevant website, optimized to attract and convert your "friends and followers" into clients and referral sources. Then, you'll need an off-line strategy to build those contacts into profitable, win-win-win relationships.

Here is the link to the Advertising Age article: What Your Favorite Social Network Says About You (July 8, 2009) http://www.relk.info/db7a12