Essential Tips from the Top 5 Law Firms on Twitter

by Justine Abbate • January 10th, 2020 • Social Media | Blog

How do lawyers and law firms optimize their Twitter accounts for success whether it’s to generate leads, generate awareness or increase client loyalty? In 2020, there are new tools and strategies that make it easier for law firms to stand out against their competitors and increase their return on investment (ROI) on the platform. Whether your law firm has been on Twitter for years or is just joining the platform, our 5 essential tips will teach you how you can deliver value on the platform and stand out amongst the noise. Alongside these tips, we’ll provide real examples from the top 5 Am Law firms on Twitter, as ranked in our 2019 Social Law Firm Index.

1. Customize your law firm’s Twitter profile

- Header: This is the larger image that should require your logo, branded image, or a unique way of portraying your brand identity.
- Profile Picture: This is the most important aspect because this appears along with any action made on your twitter account. This image can be a signature logo, firm initials, or an image of you if you are a solo practitioner.
- Bio: The profile bio allows up to 160 characters, this allows your firm to provide a short and to the point description about your message.
- Website URL: Within your firm’s bio, you can provide a direct link to your website. This call-to-action makes it easy for your users to click to your website to find out more.
- Birthday: Along with the website URL, you can add your firm’s “birthday”. In this section you can provide when your firm was founded or when your firm joined Twitter, like Squire Patton Boggs. This creates a personal relationship for your audience to experience.

Squire Patton Boggs is an excellent example of a law firm Twitter account done well, which scored them #1 place in our Social Law Firm Index. Their bio is short, sweet, to the point and includes a link back to the firm website. With over 11.4k followers, the firm not only has great reach but great engagement too.

2. Create valuable content for your audience

While growing your followers is important as it will increase your organic reach, you want to be careful that your messaging and content is inline with what your audience finds valuable. If you’re not posting useful, timely, and educational content on Twitter, you won’t engage with your audience nor create a lasting impact.

White & Case LLP follows steps to address how they can best serve their Twitter audience by adopting a clear approach to content collation and what they post. Educating and informing is the central element to their messaging, and they work constantly to ensure that their content is current and topical.

Squire Patton Boggs also does a great job posting informative content and updates to showcase what is happening across their global network. Not only do they post thought leadership and public policy insights but they also post about their client events, well-being initiatives, and inclusion and diversity projects across the U.S., Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.

3. Showcase the human side of your brand

Develop a human tone of voice for your firm on Twitter. Humanizing your brand means bringing your personality into the things you Tweet. This will in turn foster more interactions and engagement on the platform.

Hogan Lovells does a great job at showcasing the human side in their brand with their Tweets. They publicly acknowledge their lawyers and partner’s achievements, tag them, and include their picture. Lovells often Tweets about an attorney’s speaking engagement, interview or write-up in a journal.

4. Use multimedia to increase engagement in your campaigns

In creating a Twitter campaign you will have to choose the type of content you will want to create. We suggest using multimedia that includes quality videos and photos. Videos are proven to get six times the amount of engagement than tweets without them.

Latham & Watkins LLP have successfully incorporated visuals and video into their feed. This specific holiday greetings video provides content that is engaging to the client, adopting best practices in a pragmatic way, to ensure that everyone understands what clients and contacts want, need, and expect, knowing that this will equate to engagement.

5. Use hashtags related to the content you share

Law firms can use hashtags to better reach their target audience. From a user perspective, hashtags allow people to find posts that are relevant to their interests and interact with other social media users who share those interests by joining the conversation about the specific hashtag. Keep in mind that no more than two or three different hashtags should be shared with each post.

DLA Piper harnesses the power of hashtags in all of their tweets and always makes sure they’re in line with the content of the post. Their use of only two hashtags keeps the post from looking spammy and effectively expands their reach to audiences who peruse healthcare content or follow the #healthcare hashtag.

6. Track and measure results

In order to ensure that you are generating the most revenue out of your Twitter account, measuring your performance is vital. It is imperative that law firms have specific, measurable goals in place and that there is a plan to review performance consistently.

Twitter has their own built-in analytics tool called Twitter Analytics. It enables you to track important performance metrics including audience reach, engagement rate, and follower growth. With Twitter Analytics you even have access to information regarding your follower demographics, such as age household income, gender, etc. All of these insights can help inform your content strategy in Twitter.

Takeaway:

To stay relevant and gain significant value from being active Twitter, law firms should have a unique branded profile and focus on pushing out valuable content of various formats. Due to the rapidly changing nature of social media and never ending developments across the digital landscape, the need to continuously evolve across all social platforms is critical to success.

Dawn Lewis, the director of marketing at Squire Patton Boggs provided us with a commendable statement that provides a key takeaway, “we are continuously learning what works and what doesn’t for our audience and for the firm—and if it doesn’t work, we change it… Ultimately, we know social media is all about being flexible and nimble.”