Let's take a closer look at which social networks you should concentrate on and how you can utilize them to acquire more clients and make more money.

The first social networking site that you may want to sign up with is LinkedIn. This is the most professional of the social media websites, and any professional businessperson should have an account. On LinkedIn, you will mostly be able to network with other lawyers and other professionals, rather than with your clients. However, this can be a great way to get more clients if you can become friendly and work out some reciprocal agreements with your fellow lawyers. Perhaps you can refer clients to a lawyer who specializes in criminal cases, and in exchange he will refer malpractice cases to you. Besides lawyers, you can network with other professionals like doctors and judges.

The most popular social networking site by far is Facebook. Facebook is so popular that it recently surpassed Google as the most visited website on the Internet, a position that Google held for many years. One feature of Facebook that may interest you is their advertising network. You can begin an advertising campaign with Facebook in which you specify which demographic and geographic area you'd like to target. For example, if you are a lawyer who helps people who file malpractice lawsuits against doctors who have mistreated their patients, then you might want your ad to appear on someone's profile whenever they complain to one of their friends about a bad experience they had with their doctor. If you are a lawyer in the Southern California region, then you can have your ads appear solely on the profiles of those people who live in nearby cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Jose. Typically, you are only charged when one of these people click on one of your Facebook ads. Your only job from that point is to turn that prospect into a paying customer. Since many of your clients probably use Facebook every day as their primary communication method with their friends and family, they may find it convenient if you also offer to keep in touch with them via Facebook. You can quickly and easily send private messages to your clients whenever you need to discuss a specific detail about their case. Twitter is a bit different than Facebook.

As a lawyer, you might be able to use this technology to great effect. For example, you could send a message to your clients to remind them to never say anything to a police officer under any circumstances if they want to exercise their Fifth Amendment Right. Youtube is great if you want to make some videos describing your practice. Foursquare is used by people to find local businesses on their mobile devices. Tumblr is a short-form blogging platform, similar to Twitter, but you can post a wider variety of media. Delicious is a social bookmarking site where you can submit links to your website, blog, and all your other social media posts. Not every social media platform is for everyone, but using a few sites will produce significantly greater benefits than not using social media sites at all.