How a Law Firm Administrator Attracted 50,000 Twitter Followers
Actually, Christopher Levinson has 52,477 followers on Twitter, and the number grows every day. He's the administrator of Masry Vititoe, a personal injury law firm in Westlake Village, CA, near Los Angeles.
He also has 1,100 contacts on LinkedIn, which is where I met him in the New World Lawyer group.
How did he get so many followers? "I just like to do good and Tweet about things that will help people." He also automatically follows back every person who follows him.
He started his Twitter account about two years ago and modestly professes, "I still haven't gotten my arms around social media." He tweets when he has time, which means early in the morning before work and late at night before he goes to sleep. He's sent more than 1,300 tweets.
Interestingly, the account is his personally, not the law firm's, even though his tweets focus on legal issues involving potential clients of the firm. Masry Vititoe, by the way, is the law firm portrayed in the Academy Award winning film Erin Brockovich. He says he doesn't tweet as a business development tactic for the firm, but the partners certainly don't object.
Chris is a guy who loves giving back. He's the Past President and a current board member at Malibu Lost Hills Sheriff's Foundation, which helps people in the jurisdiction.
He gets the content for his tweets from several litigation and product recall listservs he belongs to. His recent tweets include:
- Ford recalls 144,000 F-150 trucks due to airbag problems - http://lnkd.in/m7hUKx
- Toyota's new round of recalls underlines difficulty automaker faces trying to put sudden-acceleration problems behind- http://lat.ms/eB8bC2
- B.O.B. Trailers Inc recalls about 337,000 single and double strollers in the United States and about 20,000 in Canada -http://bo.st/eMmkyX
- Hexavalent Chromium / Chromium VI Update: Bill seeks limited carcinogens in Calif. tap water - http://lnkd.in/xPDPWy
- Supreme Court shields vaccine makers from lawsuits -http://lat.ms/dZVbmz -6-2 ruling upholds a federal law that offers compensation to victims
- New York: City in a Deal for Removing School PCBs -aging light fixtures public schools health concerns about leaks -http://on.wsj.com/g0iFmj
Check out his Twitter growth chart:
Hi Larry,
I see from Chris's stats that he follows about 10% more people than follow him.
This means that he isn't just tweeting and following back to get followers - he's actively following lots of people to get them to follow him back. He's probably automated the process to ensure there's some targeting of who he follows.
Not that there's anything wrong with this - but missing this fact out gives a very incomplete picture of what he's doing to get that many followers.
In fact I'd venture to say that the "mass following" strategy is primarily responsible for him having so many followers. I'm happy to be corrected on that. But in my experience you don't get stats of a huge number of followers combined with even more people you;re following unless that's what you're doing.
Ian