To Tweet Or Not To Tweet

Any conversation about marketing legal services these days is bound to include a discussion about social media. For some professions and industries, Twitter and Facebook are a slam dunk.

For others, including attorneys, it's not quite as simple.

There are those who maintain that anybody not utilizing Twitter and Facebook are completely out of step. But Eric Turkewitz has an interesting blog post about the less discussed but equally relevant downside of social media as a professional marketing tool.

The first potential pitfall pertains to overly enthusiastic posting. Anyone who has been waiting on a colleague or vendor for work to be delivered, only to see semi-hourly tweets or FB posts, knows the resentment that can build.

The lesson here is to make your posts occasional and relevant.

The other potential downside to social media posts is the appearance of sloppy work. The nature of the legal profession requires reason, accuracy, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness. So a type-o riddled, grammatically butchered post is going to immediately defeat its purpose.

Now, many may think that the risk of undercutting your credibility with poorly written posts might be short lived. But, interestingly, they might be wrong.

Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the algorithms used in Google's searches disproportionately weight Twitter and Facebook accounts to appear on the first page of search results. According to Eric Turkewitz's personal research:

"I wondered, if a potential new client was given my name by another, and that person Googled me, what would they see?

Well, the first page of my results shows three separate social media sites: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. They show up there despite the fact that I've not exactly been the biggest user of those sites over the last year.

So this is what the potential new client will see, even if you have an active presence on the web. Since I've written over 800 posts in this space since I started in November 2006, and received thousands of inbound links, I probably fit the definition of active presence. And yet, those three sites still manage to crowd out links from so many others."

Of course, this is all fluid, given google's very recent announcement of "social search", which may ultimately be a competitor of facebook, as well as their new agreement with twitter to bring real-time tweets to search results.

Regardless, the lesson for attorneys considering -- or already exercising -- a Facebook or Twitter presence is this: Your social media contributions may carry disproportionate weight within search engine results.

Potential clients may form opinions and make decisions based on those search results.

If you are an attorney using social media, do a general google search on yourself and monitor the page ranking of your social media accounts.

And then tweet accordingly.