© 2018. Published in Law Practice Today, March 2018, by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association or the copyright holder.
Elizabeth H. Munnell, development coach, social media trainer, and current member of the ABA Legal Career Central board, teaches you to use twitter as a powerful tool to gather premium information, you can use in your personal and business interactions.
If you’re reading this article, it’s likely that you appreciate—or at least suspect—the prodigious power of social media (and the internet in general) to anchor professional branding and business development strategies. Perhaps you have successful colleagues or competitors who blog, independently or on their firm websites, or who regularly share content on LinkedIn and Twitter. These lawyers likely owe some portion of their robust reputations as thought leaders, experts or “players” to their strategic use of social media.
Still, most of us are reluctant to fully embrace the daunting task of designing, much less implementing, an effective social media strategy. We envision futile hours pecking away on laptops and phones and clambering through a morass of inconsequential news and opinion posts. We blanch at the awkward prospect of amassing “contacts” and “followers,” polishing our “brand,” and “selling” our firms and ourselves. It’s just too much to take on. And it feels inauthentic and undignified.
But wait. There’s a different way to go about this, one that requires not a single post or tweet… The key lies in investing the time and effort to use social media as a tool to gather the knowledge you can use offline—in your personal interactions with clients, prospects, colleagues, and other members of your professional network.
Skillfully managed, Twitter is a powerful news and data filtering platform for gathering premium information and vital insights about people, companies, industries, markets, national and world events, and ideas—information and insights that will inform both your client work and your development and business generation activities. Even if you do nothing more than follow, listen, and learn, you can use Twitter, paired with a data management tool like Hootsuite, to deepen your understanding of the clients and industries you serve, or wish to.
Read more as Elizabeth teaches you how to use Twitter as a tool to gather premium information you can use offline.