There is new ownership at Twitter as of 2023. The world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, has taken over. And he’s instituting many changes in the culture and features of Twitter.
It’s no surprise that many people, from private individuals to larger corporations, are wondering how they can make the most of the new marketing opportunities that have arisen. Read on to learn more about Twitter marketing for lawyers in light of these new developments.
Traditional Strategies for Twitter Marketing for Lawyers
In the past, you may have used Twitter to help advance your marketing efforts in several important ways.
1. Networking
As part of the Twitter legal community, you have the opportunity to connect with other lawyers and law firms in your area. Furthermore, participating in ongoing conversations in the legal field may have allowed you to develop a name for yourself. In turn, you have established your reputation and attracted more clients.
Additionally, networking on Twitter helps you connect with people in your local area who may have specific needs. As a lawyer, you likely work primarily with clients in your local community, and those connections can help bring in a steady flow of work.
2. Sharing Posts From Your Website
Your blog posts aren’t just a critical part of your legal SEO strategy. They’re also a great way to establish your expertise in your industry and create a sense of connection with people who are interested in what your law firm has to offer.
As part of your ongoing Twitter marketing strategy, you may have shared those posts to raise awareness of what you have written and generate more traffic to your website. Sharing blog posts is a great way to offer more information than you could previously share within Twitter’s character limit.
3. Promoting Your Brand
As part of the classic Twitter marketing approach for lawyers, you may have looked for opportunities to promote your brand. Sometimes, that may mean promotional posts: highlighting work you have done in the community, cases you have won, testimonials, or other information that could prove interesting to someone looking to hire a lawyer, for example.
In other cases, your Twitter marketing strategy may have included looking for ways to share information about your firm within larger conversations about the legal industry or with people who were interested in pursuing the type of legal support you can offer.
New Features in Twitter: How To Make the Most of Them for Legal Marketing
As a lawyer, several new Twitter features can help you market your brand and share information about why interested clients should connect with your firm.
1. Twitter Blue
Twitter Blue is the company’s new premium service offering. By paying for your subscription each month, you get a blue checkmark on your account that shows that you are a verified premium user. Twitter Blue also offers a number of other features that can make it worth the investment.
- Edit your Tweets. Being able to edit your Tweets offers a number of advantages. No matter how careful you are, you may occasionally allow errors into your published posts. With the edit feature, you can quickly take care of any changes you may need to make.
- Increase your ranking and search priority. When you use Twitter for marketing, you want to be sure that people can see the content you’re sharing. As a Twitter Blue user, you increase the odds that your law firm will appear at the top of relevant search results. Since people are more likely to click and follow through with the top search results, that increases the odds that they will visit your website or check out your Twitter page for more information about your firm.
- Enjoy improved formatting options. With Twitter Blue, you can use bold and italic text in your Tweets. This allows you to highlight key pieces of information that you might want to share or streamline your content for easier reading. Being able to provide visual emphasis to your content also increases the odds that users will interpret your content the way you intended.
- Use two-factor authentication to log in to your account. Increasingly, law firms must be aware of cybersecurity requirements–and increased cybersecurity does not just apply to your website. You want to make sure that the people employed by your firm, including your marketing team, are the only ones who are able to access your Twitter account. Furthermore, ensure that disgruntled people, including people your firm may have helped get a verdict against, cannot use your account against you. With two-factor authentication, you add an important layer of security that helps protect your account.
Using these features can make Twitter Blue well worth the investment.
2. Long-Form Tweets
Previously, Twitter users could use no more than 280 characters to share their messages and information. The new changes to Twitter, however, allow Twitter Blue subscribers to use up to 10,000 characters in their messaging. That means you can create longer-form content that may provide more information to your readers.
As a law firm, longer-form content can prove essential to ensuring that you can share the full message you want to bring to your followers. You may want to share critical details, offer deeper insight into a case that has made the news, or simply give the full answer to some of the most common questions clients ask when they connect with you. The new long-form content and posts make it much easier to accomplish that goal.
3. Uploading High-Quality Videos
Previous Twitter restrictions cut down on the length and quality of the video users could create. Now, Twitter Blue subscribers can upload videos up to two hours long and up to 8 GB in size. That means the opportunity to share much longer video content with your users, which can help provide them with deeper insight into what your firm can offer and why they should trust you.
While short-form content certainly still has its place, long-form content can better answer client questions, create a deeper sense of connection, and establish a higher level of authority in your field, all of which can offer a number of benefits to your brand.
4. Encrypted Direct Messages
Verified Twitter subscribers can now send encrypted direct messages. This capability provides a much higher degree of security in conversations on Twitter. As a lawyer, you want to ensure that your conversations with clients and potential clients stay private and that they cannot end up leaked because of poor security.
Of course, Twitter is not the ideal location for most private client communications. However, you may find that clients who first connect with you on Twitter want to start the conversation there. With encrypted direct messages, as long as both of you are verified users, you can maintain that higher degree of privacy.
5. Upcoming Edit Features
Right now, Twitter Blue users can edit content shared within 30 minutes. That may mean that you can change the order of the media shared in your Tweet, add extra content, or tag another user: your lawyers’ direct accounts, for example, or perhaps a local business that needs to take part in a conversation. As changes to Twitter continue to roll out, the edit feature may include the option to edit Tweets longer after they have been posted, especially for verified users.
6. Twitter Circle
Most of the time, in marketing your law firm, you want to create content that has a very broad reach. However, sometimes, you want to participate in more niche conversations. Enter Twitter Circle. This new feature allows users to choose select individuals to enter into a specific Twitter Circle.
Only users within that Circle can reply to and interact with Tweets shared within that content. This may allow you to have more extensive conversations about specific legal topics within a smaller group. Or, you can make more connections within the local community. You can only have one Twitter Circle, but it can include up to 150 people.
How To Optimize Your Twitter Account
Ready to optimize your Twitter account? Make sure you’re prepared to follow these key steps.
1. Set your goals
Know what you want to accomplish with your Twitter marketing efforts. Are you interested in:
- Increasing your network?
- Keeping an eye on the latest conversations in the legal industry?
- Increasing your law firm’s overall visibility?
Knowing your overall goals can help shape your Twitter marketing efforts and ensure that you remain on track as you connect with your target audience, share Tweets, and participate in the ongoing conversation.
2. Get to know your target audience
Carefully consider whom your law firm hopes to connect with through your Twitter posts. What do they need from you? Consider all sides of your audience.
- Other law firms in your local area.
- People in your target area who are looking for a lawyer to handle specific needs.
- Members of your local community who are adjacent to your practice area. For example, if you work in personal injury law, you might connect with physical therapists or doctors who handle acute injuries.
When you know who you’re hoping to connect with on Twitter, you can better tailor your actions to support those goals.
3. Monitor the conversation
If you want to optimize your Twitter account, you need to know what people are talking about. Consider keywords that are relevant to your firm’s practice area. Pay attention to major news and events, whether it’s a recent condo collapse that has people talking about the rights of premise accident victims or a celebrity divorce that has changed the conversation around spousal support or child custody.
As you monitor the ongoing conversation, including trending hashtags, look for opportunities to participate. Answer some of those burning questions. Provide insight into the situation. As you share your knowledge, you’re also building trust, both within the greater legal community and for people who may be interested in becoming clients of your firm.
4. Pay attention to news events
As mentioned above, when something big happens, you may need to go to Twitter quickly. Kick off or participate in that conversation as soon as possible. Keep an eye on the news, especially as it pertains to your specific practice area. And don’t be afraid to share your expertise when you have something to add to the conversation.
5. Share relevant content and information
Do you want your Twitter account to be noticed? Then, it’s important to regularly share relevant content and information. Some experts suggest that between 2-3 Tweets per day is the ideal posting frequency to help ensure that your content gets noticed. Twitter moves fast.
Even if you’re sharing up-to-date information about the latest happenings, your Tweets can quickly get buried as others participate in the conversation. As a result, you can’t afford to get lazy about posting.
Fortunately, you can schedule many of your Tweets ahead of time. As a result, your content will stay top of mind.
6. Monitor your results and adapt as needed
As with other forms of digital marketing, your Twitter marketing platform allows you to carefully monitor engagement. How many people are reacting to your posts? What type of content is most likely to draw people to your website? Modify your posting schedule and strategy as needed to create more content that is relevant to your followers and likely to create the desired response.
LawRank Can Help Manage Your Social Media and Legal Marketing
Are you ready to take your Twitter marketing efforts to the next level? Do you want to incorporate your Twitter marketing efforts into your larger marketing plan, integrating your Tweets with your other outreach strategies?
At LawRank, we have the tools you need to succeed. We can manage your social media and other digital legal marketing efforts, expand your reach, and help you bring in more clients who are interested in everything you have to offer.
