How Much Time Should Lawyers Spend Blogging and Tweeting?

The social media snake oil sales people make you feel like an ogre for not devoting your life to blogs, Twitter, and all that ilk.  We’re not going to deny that social media is important to growing your practice.  It coitanly is.  However, since there are so many online communities and mediums and only so many hours in the day,  it helps to get a handle around some data to make some time allotment decisions.

Enter the wise folks at HubSpot.  They publish a great resource, The State of Inbound Lead Generation, with the following observations:

Those business to consumer (B2C) companies who blog have more monthly leads by 88% over those who don’t.  Business to Business companies (B2B)  generate 67% more leads.  Law firms fall into both categories, since they court potential clients and referrals. Also keep in mind companies see traffic inflection points at approximately 25 posts and then around 300 posts.  That’s when things really start to take off.

The Twitteratti likewise can point to evidence that those using Twitter typically generate twice as many leads as those that don’t.  Note that this is statistical correlation, not necessarily cause and effect.  It can be argued that those embracing Twitter for marketing purposes are ahead of the curve anyhow, just as it can be said with bloggers.

The HubSpot folks note that Twitter is effective once several hundred followers are established.  Click here to read more from this fascinating report.

Conclusion?  Allocate your time based on your goals, but recognize the importance in building up a portfolio of great blog posts.  I tend to favor more time spent blogging, since I’m adding some interesting thoughts to the world, sharing ideas, getting people interested in my company by what we share on a level that Twitter cannot provide.  Of course, it also helps that blogging helps with our search engine results.  So for me, the following is a good breakdown of the hours per week I spend specifically on social media.

As the guy in charge of getting out the Rocket Matter message, I tend to spend more than normal, at probably around 7 hours per week.  And keep in mind I write very quickly.  But if you can squeeze in three to five hours per week on various activities, you’re probably in good shape.

If you’re interested in hearing more on this subject, including how to best match social media with your goals, pop in to our free webinar this Friday hosted by Fastcase.