Twitter for Business Development in Law Firms

07
Sep
2011

Simon Ellison-Bunce

Whenever I think about new technologies for business development in law firms, I'm reminded of the reaction I got when showing an email broadcast tool to the Head of Marketing for a large firm in San Francisco in early 2002: "Email? Our clients don't want information from us by email!".

Until fairly recently, I would almost certainly have got a similar reaction had I suggested using Twitter for Business Development. But firms of all sizes are realising that Twitter and other social media tools are much more than a passing fad and really can provide some unique benefits for comparatively little resource.

Firms that aren't already using Twitter to some extent are now decidedly in the minority.

Fundamentally Business Development is about demonstrating your expertise, in order to win new clients and retain existing ones. Communicating useful content has always been an important part of that process; what's changed over the years are the means by which the content is delivered, and the ways in which the audience is engaged with it. Think about social media as just another step along the path that has led from printed brochures to email newsletters to interactive websites, and it doesn't seem quite so radical.

In the rest of this article I'm going to look at some key advantages of Twitter as a platform, at what success on Twitter might look like for a firm, and at some metrics by which that could be measured.

A common Business Development aim is to ensure that the firm's content reaches as many relevant people as possible. In that respect using Twitter is little different to email, or before that to posting printed material - it's just another channel. But Twitter brings a number of significant advantages. To start with, there is no barrier to entry, it's free and effectively instant - content can be made available to your audience immediately, with no need to select recipients or create emails. Twitter makes it easy to significantly grow your audience without additional effort or cost. And crucially, it provides a means for opening a dialog with your audience that can increase engagement and further spread influence. What really matters is the content.

Most firms start on Twitter by using it to distribute announcements and other content available on their web site. Make it easy for Twitter users to follow you by providing a link to your Twitter feed on your web site, and by including it on stationery and in email footers. If your content is informative and insightful then your followers are likely to pass it on ("retweet" it) to their followers, spreading your firms' brand and influence. Similarly, you can follow accounts that are producing content useful to your firm - clients, associated professional services firms, experts, media, even other law firms. It's important not to treat Twitter as simply a broadcast medium, so be prepared to listen, respond and engage in dialog.

So, how to measure success on Twitter? Again, comparisons with email marketing can be helpful. One obvious metric for your firm's Twitter account is the number of followers it has. But by itself that's not very useful, because it provides no information about who those followers are or what their reaction to your content is. It would be similar to judging the success of your email marketing just by looking at the number of recipients you're sending to.

However, services are now available on the web that aim to provide more in-depth analysis of influence on Twitter - Klout and PeerIndex are the leading providers. By looking at your content, patterns in the ways your followers react to it, and how you interact with your followers, they generate a simple score to represent your measure of influence. Think of this as the equivalent to measuring open and clickthrough rates in email marketing. Working towards a high score should not be an end in itself, but equally a low score would suggest you're not making the most of the platform. These scoring systems are still in their infancy, but they do at least provide some measure of how successfully your firm is engaging on Twitter. In the future they will exand to identify the topics on which your account is most influential, and conversely identify who the key influencers are for any given topic.