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Twitter to selling lawyers advertising opportunites?

October 6, 2010

It should not be lost on anyone that lawyers are big advertisers on Google. Just do a search for a divorce or personal injury lawyer for a particular metro area and you’ll see sponsored links lawyers bought from Google under Google’s adwords program. Lawyers looking for asbestosis clients have been known to pay $91 for each click on a sponsored link for ‘mesothelioma lawyer.’

Could we see the same on Twitter? Perhaps. Read/WriteWeb reports Twitter has been hard at work to find different ways of earning advertising money and the latest attempt comes in the form of promoted accounts.

Already, the site offered visibility to brands through promoted trends and promoted tweets, and now promoted accounts will help increase the visibility of the account itself, not just the content.

According to a Twitter blog post, promoted accounts will be a part of the ‘suggestions for you’ feature on Twitter.com, which suggests users to follow according to who you already follow and who your friends follow.

How would it work for lawyers? Take someone following quite a few Twitter users who were sharing information and news related to divorce matters. Twitter may be able to identify your location and suggest following accounts of divorce lawyers in your area. Divorce lawyers would pay Twitter for such exposure.

Sponsored accounts may not be attractive to just personal plight lawyers doing divorce, bankruptcy, or personal injury work. Imagine a Twitter user following venture capitalists and others sharing info on emerging growth companies. Law firms looking to represent startups could buy a Twitter promoted account so Twitter would suggest to such users to follow such law firms. It would be the same for estate planning lawyers looking to reach Twitter users who follow Twitter accounts sharing financial planning information.

Sounds simple. Even seems like it could be done tastefully by lawyers.

But never underestimate lawyers not willing to share helpful information on the Internet themselves to turn a good thing into shlock by throwing money at advertising. And of course we’ll have the legal marketers looking to make a quick buck acting as a middleman selling such ads (sponsored accounts) to lawyers.

Note that you may not see promoted accounts yet. Twitter is initially testing the feature with a handful of companies.

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