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Blog and Twitter when your audience is listening

For lawyers, setting time aside during a business day to blog or Twitter is tough to do. I’m the same way. Despite the best of intentions to get with my blogging at least a couple times a week, phone calls, meetings, and the press of other business matters get in the way.

But unlike publishing articles or info on websites, blogs and twitter are part of a conversation. So if everyone’s gone home, there’s no one to engage, no conversation to join, and no one who’s going to share what you’re blogging or twittering about with other members of your target audience.

For legal professionals, and most other Americans we work on business matters from 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. That’s also peak hours for consuming news and info as it relates to our profession.

So though Saturday, Sunday, and evenings may seem like the only time you have for blogging and twittering, the greatest return on investment comes in partaking in blogging and twittering during business hours. You’ll need to carve out the time. And if client development is one of the more important things you do in business, you may be carving out that time during the first hours of the day a few times a week.

For peers and bosses who think you’re wasting time on social media during business hours, you’ll need to explain the premise of social media being a conversation. A conversation in your case engaging your target audience and building meaningful relationships for practice and client development.

  • http://blog.jparkhill.com Jay Parkhill

    It’s easy to blog and schedule the post for publication early on a weekday, so I’m not sure I agree with that part. Write when you have a chance and publish when people are looking.
    . . .then again, I am reading and commenting on this at 9pM on a Saturday.
    Tweets get lost in the stream quickly. I find myself tweeting play stuff much more on the weekends and connecting with a different set of contacts that way.

  • http://www.adamsdrafting.com Ken Adams

    I agree with Jay. I’ve been working on a handful of blog posts this holiday weekend, but I won’t be publishing any of them until after the holiday.
    Furthermore, even if I post something on a weekend, I know that if you have subscribed to my feed that post will appear in your reader as unread whenever you get around to consulting it.
    But tweets are fleeting by comparison.

  • http://kevin.lexblog.com Kevin

    Thanks for the comments guys. Though I have the ability to schedule posts, I’ve never done it. The reason is that I really view blogs as being part of a conversation, as opposed to authoring a short article.
    While I’d feel comfortable holding an article till next week, I have hard time holding something I said back in a balloon and letting out into the air when I thought the timing right.
    Understand most of posts are referential in nature. I am referring to something someone else wrote – blogger, reporter, or someone quoted in a blog or in the news. I also refer to what people are saying on the live Internet – Twitter.
    This is the style I’ve developed based on what I’ve seen leaders like Scoble, Winer, and Searls do. Based on what I’ve learned from them, social media and blogs seem like a conversation. In a conversation thoughts come out at the time, they’re not bottled for later.

  • http://www.smallfirmfocus.com Nancy Hammond

    Kevin:
    Interesting point about blog posts being part of a conversation, as opposed to an article. I have only written two posts in my blog over three weeks and I think that my confusion on what exactly it’s supposed to be — a conversation or an article — has been my main problem in moving forward!
    I was conflicted. My first two blogs posts are very conversational, but I started second-guessing myself that future posts needed to be more article-like to be taken seriously.
    You’ve taken a lot of pressure off of me that I’ve put on myself. I’m going to go with my gut and go conversational!