Are you following your clients on Twitter?

Good attorneys and law firms are always looking for ways to stay in touch in with their clients.

Weeks can go by without meeting a client on an active matter. Months or a year can by without talking to a client for which you have no matters pending. How do you stay in touch?

Many law firms send out newsletters and alerts, arguably to share helpful information, with the intent to keep ‘mind share.’ That’s a one-way broadcast style of communicating. You’re not engaging the client, listening to the client, nor meeting them on their turf.

An easy way to stay in touch with clients is to follow them on Twitter. It’s becoming more and more common that people have Twitter accounts, whether business leaders or consumers.

Look up your clients on Twitter. Look in their LinkedIn profile for their Twitter handle. Start following your clients.

Set up a list for your clients in Twitter. You may then browse a ready made list of only those things your clients are sharing on Twitter on your desktop, smart phone, or tablet. It’s easy to display your list of client tweets via TweetDeck or an iPhone and iPad app such as Twitterific.

You need not get into a back and forth conversation with your client on Twitter. It may even be totally inappropriate to do so and, in certain cases, unethical.

But retweeting something they shared will be seen by your client and be viewed with favor. So will openly congratulating them on Twitter if it was a success your client was sharing on Twitter.

Seeing a client Tweet may open the door to communication with your client other than on Twitter. For example I just noticed that Las Vegas Attorney Tim Totolo, a LexBlog Network member and client, shared word of a recent verdict of his on Twitter. His tweet linked to a blog post which shared that he was able to obtain a verdict in excess of $4 Million for a brain injury victim in an inadequate security case.

I congratulated Tim in a comment on his blog for the result he obtained for his client and her family and wished him success in resolving the claim without a protracted appeal.

Tim responded by email within minutes thanking me for the kind words, asked me how things were going at LexBlog, and wished me a happy holiday season. I’ll respond by email in a couple minutes. That’s neat.

There’s no way I could have engaged Tim on his turf and shared in his success unless I was following him on Twitter.

It’s the rare attorney who is savvy enough to stay in touch with clients by phone, coffee, lunch, or social activity. Others don’t have enough time in the day to stay in touch with all the clients they’d like to.

But bear in mind it’s the simple things in life that can matter most. And nothing is more simple than Twitter.