Building Your Twitter Community

You can’t have a purposeful, meaningful experience on Twitter without a feed that compels you to keep scrolling, learning, and engaging. And to do that you need to follow the right people and in the process, build your Twitter community. 

Related: Twitter Best Practices for Lawyers: How to Enhance Engagement. 

Before we get into it, naysayers who contend that Twitter has become a cesspool of haters and trolls, deliberately choosing who to follow can help you steer clear of that, for the most part. The rest, block liberally if they invade your space. Many of them are bots so they won’t mind. AI hasn’t imbued bots with feelings. Yet.

Even if you have the laudable intention of changing minds, you won’t with 140/280 characters, and you’ll just make yourself miserable in the process.

But I digress. Let’s get to building your Twitter tribe. 

Podcast guests (and hosts) are a rich source of passionate, accomplished people to follow. You certainly wouldn’t host a podcast or reach out to guests who are just lazing around. The innovators, activists, and people who care deeply are podcasting. After listening to episodes that resonate, follow them on Twitter. 

Same applies to TED Talks presenters, conference speakers, favorite book authors, and so on. 

Explore event hashtags. Every conference or event uses Twitter to help boost exposure. Most attach a unique hashtag to the Twitter feed.  

For example, check out #TBDLaw for conversations with innovative lawyers, or #LMAMKT for change agents in legal marketing and to discover local chapter and national events with corresponding hashtags such as #LMASE17.

The list is endless.

I found out about these from the people I follow so following the right people will help you find more of the right people to follow. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Check out who your favorite people are following. Some people follow everyone that follows them – the whole reciprocity thing. But for those who don’t, their thoughtfully curated Twitter follows are a gold mine to pick through. 

Note that not all of the people you find interesting in person or in another forum will have great Twitter feeds. Some may tweet too much, some too little. Others may disappoint. Only follow the accounts that resonate. It’s okay to have a quick “unfollow” trigger finger if the account fails to offer consistent value or goes off the rails. 

You will observe that this is not about following and engaging with people in your profession only but around issues you care about, be it marketing, access to justice, legal technology, or knitting.

There are many great lawyers out there, many SEO experts, many JavaScript specialists (well, maybe not as many), and with competence being equal, people hire and recommend people they relate to, respect, and trust. So show the different sides of you so people discover you, get to know you, and welcome you into their Twitter community. 

There are many ways to make Twitter a purposeful, meaningful experience, such as adding your voice, engaging, and curating, but nothing quite so impactful as following the right people. In the process, you will develop relationships – some deep – with people you never imagined meeting.