This is the second of two posts about “What Career Service Office Advisors Should be Telling Students About Social Media.”  The first post introduced you to the idea that social media is something career service offices should be advising students to participate in.  It also discussed how to use LinkedIn as a law student, and the potential perils for doing so.  If you missed it, you can check it out here.

This post will discuss Twitter and Facebook, and how to use them as a law student. I will also discuss how to carefully restrict your use and settings of these services so that you can still use them fully without hindering your job search.

Twitter

If you are reading this site, it is likely you know what Twitter is.  If not, you can see what Twitter is, explained in plain English.  This site has shown you several great Twitter tools, and even looked at how using Twitter can make you a better legal writer.  Now I will discuss briefly how to get started on Twitter, where you can find legal professionals on Twitter, and offer guidance about the risks of using Twitter.

Getting Started on Twitter

One of the first things you have to decide when getting onto Twitter is your username.  My personal recommendation is to use your real name or a variant thereof.  If you plan on using Twitter to increase your personal brand name, get your name out there in the legal community and network, I think using your real name just makes sense.

OK, so you’ve got yourself a Twitter account.  You’ve uploaded a photo and changed your background (all of these are a must, so you don’t look like just a bot when you start following people).  Now what?  How do you create content and gather followers?  There are myriad posts about that on the Internet, and I don’t think I have better ideas than anyone else out there.  One tremendous resource is TwiTip.

Finding People to Follow

As opposed to telling you how to get people to follow you on Twitter, I will tell you where to find legal professionals to follow on Twitter.  Why would you want to follow legal professionals on Twitter?  Well, if you are in the legal field or want to be, there are a ton of people you can follow that share your interests.  You can read their updates and hear about things going on all over the world from a legal perspective.  You can learn more about the day-to-day goings on of lawyers, paralegals, law students and legal marketers to see if those are really things you want to do.  Or, you can find strength in numbers during these somewhat depressing economic times.

There are three great sites to find other legal professionals on Twitter.  Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

The powerhouse in finding legal professionals on Twitter is LexTweet.  Their database has almost 2,000 people in it.  LexTweet, like the other sites I will show you, is opt-in.  The great thing about this site is that it ranks people by the number of followers they have.  LexTweet also has a real-time update of tweets right on their front page.  Regardless of the number of followers those people have, you can just go to the site and see what people have been saying.

On the downside, LexTweet does not tell you anything about the people on the site.  You have to click on the link to their Twitter page and investigate those individuals for yourself.

Legal website JD Supra has put together a list of over 600 people and legal news feeds.  The nice thing about JD Supra’s list is that in addition to the person’s Twitter username, it displays a portion of their bio.  This way, you can get a sense of what kind of person this is, even before looking at their tweets.  The down side of JD Supra is that it is only updated occasionally.  Nonetheless, it is nice to be able to scroll down the entire list and see if anyone’s bio catches your eye.

Justia has a relatively new feature on their site called LegalBirds.  This site has several great features.  First, you can find people by practice area.  You can see how many connections in the LegalBirds community people have, and search that way.  Finally, and in my opinion most importantly, you can search by geographic area.  That allows you to find people that work where you do, where you want to, or where you are planning on working.  It is a tremendous networking tool and definitely worth trying out.

The Risks of Twitter
There is really one main risk to using Twitter. Mainly, people will judge you based on your updates, or tweets. As a result, you can hurt your reputation. In general, and especially in a small community like the legal field, your reputation is sometimes all you have. So read on to make sure you don’t throw it away.

Hurting Your Reputation

If you are already on LinkedIn and you participate anywhere else on the internet, you’ve created a reputation for yourself in the digital world. When looking for a job, an employer can get a sense for this digital reputation when they Google you. Your real world reputation they get to know from letters of recommendation, where you work, etc.

As the old adage goes, reputations take a lifetime to build up, but only seconds to destroy. That means you have to be careful about what you discuss on Twitter. Will you tweet like @Rex7, who sticks almost exclusively to one area? Will you be more like me? I tend to tweet mostly about my life and random goings on. Regardless of your style, you should think about all of your tweets as if your future employer could read them. Realize that employers know that we have social lives, they know that we are actual people, but they don’t want to know too much about such things. So keep it appropriate on Twitter. Some things that may make an employer think less of you:

• If you constantly tweet about doing nothing at work and not studying or putting any effort into school
• If you write any thing racist/sexist or in any way bigoted
• If you speak poorly about your current employer
• If you speak poorly about people you work with

A quick note on protecting your updates: One way to ensure that you can write pretty much anything on Twitter without people seeing it is to protect your updates.  That means you have to approve anyone that follows you.  A good number of people do this and there is some benefit, but in my opinion it takes away from the community-centered focus of Twitter.

“Guilt” by Association
This risk, compared to hurting your reputation, is pretty low on Twitter. The only time I could see this becoming an issue

Facebook
I think it is relatively safe to assume you are familiar with Facebook. It is one of the largest social networking sites on the internet, open to anyone that wants to join. There are some tremendous benefits of Facebook.

However, Facebook is primarily still being used for social purposes. That is fine. It’s fun to catch up with old friends, post pictures, play with applications, etc. So I wanted to discuss mostly how to use Facebook smartly. In other words, how to creatively limit your security so that you can keep using Facebook the way you want, and not run the risk of your drunk shenanigans being the talk of the office on Monday.

When I began this post I wrote out all the things I wanted to show you how to do, and explain with screenshots. Then, while reading an American Bar Association site, I came across this article. It tells you exactly how to handle your privacy in many different ways, and how to effectively use the site while being discreet. So, I am just going to send you over to Nick O’Neill’s article instead of repeating everything here.

Conclusion
I realize this post was a little long, so thanks for staying with me! I hope you learned a lot and are better equipped to enjoy the internet for all its worth. Even if you haven’t, hopefully you’ve learned that these products are available to you, and they are great tools no matter what your interests are. Embrace them and enjoy them. Remember that you can have fun on the internet with your friends without sacrificing your professional reputation. Now, hopefully within the next couple of years Career Service Office Advisors will be showing students how to effectively use these websites instead of running from them like the plague. The internet can be the potential lawyer’s greatest tool, once law students stop cowering in fear and start wielding the internet like the tool it is.

For more see:

What Career Service Office Advisors Should be Telling Students About Social Media [Part 1/2]

Related posts:

1. What Career Service Office Advisors Should be Telling Students About Social Media [Part 1/2]
2. Social Media Best Practices for Law Schools (Part 2)
3. Social Media Law Student Microblog Posts and Links on Twitter
4. How LexTweet Brings Legal Community Together on Twitter
5. Why Some Law Schools Discourage Social Media: Student Blogging
6. Top 20 Blog Posts of All Time
7. Social Media Law Student Microblog Posts and Links on Twitter
8. Rex Gradeless of Social Media Law Student Featued on LexBlog Q & A
9. Lawyer’s Guide for Engaging in Social Media
10. Facebook Cuts Junk Launches Facebook Lite