The Attorney's Office Tools
to communicate with your audience—to learn what they want to read, to garner their advice and to create a dialogue for future relationships. Also, be sure to monitor the comments for potential clients—many users post comments to look for a willing lawyer. Finally, monitor the progress of your blog by tracking the
statistics—a good program like Google Analytics will allow to you to see how many readers visit your blog every day, how long they stay at your site, what search terms they used to find you, and whether they came from links on other websites. Using these tools, you can deduce what your readers want more of, and you can fine-tune your blogging to meet your goals.
Twitter Contrary to popular belief, Twitter is not just good for
telling people the minutiae of your day-to-day existence. Rest assured, if you use Twitter to regularly tell people what you had for breakfast, when you are napping, and the amount of laundry you have to do, you will not have a many “followers.” First, a brief introduction to Twitter: it is an internet-based social networking service that you log into. You can follow other Twitter users, and other Twitter users can follow you. You post short updates and messages consisting of 140 characters or less (one character equals one click of a key on the keyboard). You are not limited in the number of posts you make per day. Other online applications (Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed and Twitpic, to name a few) provide expanded functionality, allowing you to link pictures, automatically link your blog posts, manage multiple twitter accounts, track statistics and Tweet from your smartphone. Te value in Twitter is to expand your network of sources
relevant to your practice. You can follow fellow practitioners of specific litigation and news outlets. Tese can provide fodder for your blogs, improve your practice strategy, and provide you with information on virtually any subject. Also, you can use Twitter to further
propound your online presence—ideally, other practitioners will follow you, and “retweet” your messages, including links to your website and blogs. Tose retweets will then be viewable by all of the followers of the retweeters (and potentially retweeted by those followers, and so on), which will get your name out there. With Twitter, you can create “lists” of
other users to follow, effectively segregating the updates of all your followers into user- friendly folders. Tis is useful to keep you on task—do you want to check in on your “fun” Tweets (celebrities, fictional characters, family); do you want to find the latest “news” (television, radio and newspaper media services); or do you want to discover what is new in a particular are of interest (for example, you can follow governmental units
like the FDA, and large corporations/potential defendants like AstraZeneca). You might choose a Twitter account that is essentially your
on-line persona, or you might make an account that is the on- line personification of your law firm. Like blogging, you will soon develop a cadre of friends and professionals that you follow and who follow you. Importantly, you should always be mindful of social networking etiquette for every update. Ask yourself if the update is something that your readers would want to read and related to your mission. Too many Twitter users are dumped because they post updates that their readers find extraneous to the reasons they followed in the first place. For example, the Twitter user “@NursingHomeLawyer” should not ordinarily post on the score of last night’s game. When using Twitter to network, be sure to take the time
to write, e-mail or call people you meet. In particular, it is good etiquette to thank Twitter users who retweet your tweets and post links to your blogs or websites
Facebook Facebook is a social networking site used by children and
adults alike. Trough Facebook, you can post information about yourself including status updates (like Twitter, though without the character limit), photos, and even events. Most law firms use twitter in one of two ways: though groups or fan pages. Groups are more geared toward discussion by people about
a particular topic, though some firms use them as part of their social networking strategy. Fan pages, however, are more geared toward law firms—pages may be created by official representatives of a law firm, and are intended to help the business communicate publicly. Importantly, pages also create a distinction between the user’s regular Facebook profile and their business profile—the Fan pages do not show the names of the administrators. When
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