Twitter is a powerful tool that makes it easy for lawyers to listen to what is happening in the legal industry and within your target markets; engage in profitable conversations with colleagues and ideal clients; and influence what people think about you and your law practice.

When used effectively, Twitter will not only increase traffic to your website or blog, it can also increase referrals and inquiries from ideal clients.   The following are 17 ways to start leveraging the power of Twitter in your law practice.   These tips are broken into three categories to make it easy for you to get started right now.  Start off trying two or three and build up to all 17.

Listen to Learn What’s Being Said & Done in the Legal Industry and Your Target Market.

1.       Monitor trends in the legal industry by following and interacting with legal industry leaders.   Use a tool like Kurrently at http://Kurrently.com to search for keywords related to your practice areas and target markets.

2.       Monitor breaking news by following leading journalists and news outlets.  Check out resources like Muckrack at http://muckrack.com to find journalists to follow.

3.       Track mentions of your clients, prospective clients, colleagues and lawyers in your competitive space on Twitter.   Using a tool like Twilert at http://twilert.com makes this easy to do.

4.       Measure the effectiveness of your blog and article titles by tracking click rates for links to your blog or website.   Using an online tracking tool like http://Bitly.com makes it easy to do this.

5.       Track and monitor tweets from legal industry events by following hashtags.  Hashtags are keywords that are preceded by the pound (“#”) sign.  To see this in action, go to http://search.twitter.com and search for “#dcbartwt” to follow tweets from social media training programs sponsored by the DC Bar Association.    

6.       Determine the reach and potential impact of your tweets by using a tool like TweetReach at http://tweetreach.com

Engage to Attract Your Ideal Client

7.       Expand your network by building relationships with legal industry leaders. You can find thousands of lawyers and professionals who serve the legal industry by visiting LexTweet at http://lextweet.com.

8.       Increase referrals by building relationships with lawyers in complimentary practice areas.  Start by forwarding “tweets” posted by lawyers you respect with your Twitter community. This is called “retweeting.”

9.       Monitor trends in your target industries by following, interacting and sharing relevant content with industry leaders and prospective clients.  Find great people to follow using tools like http://wefollow.com.

10.   Attract media attention by interacting with journalists providing commentary about current legal topics.   JournalistTweets at http://www.journalisttweets.com is great source for finding journalists to follow.

Influence to Convert Leads into Client

11.   Establish yourself as an industry leader by thoughtful legal commentary on current legal events.

12.   Demonstrate your expertise and ability to get results by sharing law firm highlights, favorable rulings and accomplishments.

13.   Drive traffic to your website and build credibility as an innovative lawyer and thought leader by sharing links to your blog posts, articles, podcasts or videos.  

14.   Share case alerts and relevant “breaking news” by using a tool that can translate your voice into Tweets.  TwitterFhone makes it easy to do this. You can check it out at http://twitterfhone.com.

15.   Send reminders about important deadlines for your target market and ideal clients.  Encourage your current clients and online community to subscribe and receive your “important updates” Tweets on their mobile phones.  Consider creating a separate Twitter account that is just for sharing these “special updates.”

16.   Share links to your law firm newsletter to drive website traffic, build credibility and establish your expertise as a subject matter expert.

17.   Share information about seminars, networking opportunities and CLE programs with your online community.  Use a tool like Plancast at http://plancast.com to automatically share notices about upcoming events on multiple social networks.

Now that you have 17 ways to increase your influence, impact and income using social media, pick a few and get into UpwardAction® today.