With hundreds of "social media" vehicles online, it is impossible for any human being to use them all. The two elephants in the room are Facebook and Twitter.
Should every DUI lawyer have a Twitter and Facebook page?
Absolutely…with a caveat.
The great thing about Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets is that they are free. The problem with Facebook, Twitter and other social medial outlets is also that they are free.
All lawyers want to get business for free, but if all lawyers use the free media outlets and are competing for a fixed number of clients, the efforts of you and your competitors should cancel each other out. Right?
The answer, I believe, depends on how lawyers use these free media sources.
Why should DUI Lawyers Tweet?
If you just got a DUI and you are an intelligent and affluent person who is too embarrassed to ask a friend for a referral, you probably go online to look. You want good information, fast. You don't want to have to slog your way through a series of 140 character bursts. Unless you are looking for clients who speak in sentence fragments, Twitter is not the best direct source to get clients. But it is an essential piece of the equation.
If you do nothing else with Twitter, here's what I recommend:
Set up your Twitter account. Set up your blog's RSS feed to automatically post your entries on your Twitter feed. It's that simple. And with 10 minutes of setup, now each blog post you make gets broadcast to your "followers" on Twitter. This is unlikely to get you clients either, at least directly. But what it can do is drive targeted traffic back to your blog, where people can find out about you. If they like what you say, they may link to your content. If they link to your content, it is more likely that you will get more links to your content. After a while, if done right, it can turn into a beast that feeds itself.
Warning: Do not mix a personal Twitter feed with a business feed. Your clients don't want to know that you're sitting in Avatar and it's awesome. They don't want to know the cute thing your kid said, or your prediction for the Lakers-Celtics point spread. Keep it simple, keep it business, and keep it separate.
The same goes for Facebook.
You can set up a "fan" page for your practice and invite your friends to become fans of yours.
Wait a second… Do lawyers have fans? Do DUI lawyers? Huh? Don't despair, you can always learn to play the guitar. And in the meantime, some of your friends will join up to be nice. The benefit of the fan page is that you can run your other feeds through it. Your posts appear on your fan site. Your fans then serve your stuff through their Facebook profile for their friends to see, and it can grow exponentially.
A highly attenuated Facebook friend, perhaps an old girlfriend or somebody you haven't seen since high-school who might not otherwise know what you do for a living might become a person-to-person referral source. That's the real world magic of Facebook.
Once in a blue moon somebody who is a friend of a friend who happens to have a pending DUI case might see your stuff through a feed, become a fan, and even a client. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Facebook and Twitter are absolutely essential supplements to anything else you are doing online. Just don't rely on them as primary or secondary sources for client development. And for the love of all that is sane and simple, don't pay somebody to "manage" or set up a Twitter or Facebook page.
You can't afford to not use Facebook and Twitter. Twitter and Facebook are stop-loss measures in today's Internet economy. If you don't use them and your competition does, you will incrementally lose market-share. But understand that only exclusive things, things that your competition does not have and can not get, really give you the edge online and increase your piece of the pie.
My name is Dan Jaffe. I recently retired from practicing DUI law after more than a decade of running a law firm and using the internet as my firm's primary source of business.