1. THEY THINK IT’S THE SAME AS THE YELLOW PAGES
Fact: Twitter is not the yellow pages.
Fact: Twitter is great for telling your followers something interesting.
Fact: Twitter is not great for telling us what you ate for lunch or that you’re going on a big date tonight.
Fact: A person in need of an attorney is not going to look for, or find you on twitter. Why not? Because that’s not what it’s for. It’s for having a conversation. It’s for talking about useful information. It’s about telling me you found a great article or video that I really should see.
Fact: It’s really not the yellow pages.
2. THEY THINK IT’S THE SAME AS A TV AD
TV ads scream at you. They say “Come to me, because I’m a lawyer and I’m on TV.” Many lawyers mistakenly think that Twitter is the same. It’s not. I cringe every time I see a tweet that says “Jim Jones, accident atty in my state. Call me at…”
I always ask myself “Why?” Why should I call them if I have a legal problem? Just because they put a useless tweet out there? No thanks. I’ll find someone who actually offers useful information.
3. THEY THINK IT’S ALL ABOUT THEM
Yellow pages ads are all about the attorney. “Look at me! Look at what I do. Look at what I’ve done!” TV ads are similar yet they rarely give you much useful information to help you understand why they are a better lawyer for you than the lawyer who just had their commercial only 30 seconds before yours.
Twitter isn’t about you. If you want to use it effectively, make it about your followers and what they want. Not you!
4. THEY THINK THAT IT’S ANOTHER TOOL TO REPEATEDLY DISPLAY THEIR NAME
Why do some lawyers think that by repeatedly posting tweets that say their name, their town and their phone number that someone would actually call them for their legal services? Frequency does not mean you’ll get business. In fact, I don’t know of a single lawyer who uses Twitter that way who has actually gotten a single client doing so.
5. THEY THINK THAT BY HAVING MORE FOLLOWERS IT MEANS MORE BUSINESS
This is such a fallacy. The concept of having more followers does not mean more business. Want to know why? If you have 10,000 followers, do you think they really care about your tweets? No. They just want to see their followers increase each day.
In my experience, if you have a core group of followers who are actually interested in what you have to say and you have actual conversations where you share information, you are much more likely to get a referral from one of those people than if you continually strive to get more followers who don’t know you and frankly don’t care about you.
CONCLUSION:
By learning to share information and actually pay attention to what others are tweeting about, you stand a much better chance of having someone send you a potential client than if you continue to talk and tweet about yourself.
