Infographics are HOT. All the rage. You see them everywhere, on themes from gay rights (broken down by state) to Pinterest user demographics.

Visual.ly is a site devoted to showcasing great infographics, and has a few nifty tools for creating your own. A popular one is the “Twitter Account Showdown” – examples of which can be found here and here . These infographics are quite large and impressive-looking, but Visual.ly makes it very easy to produce one. Just plug in two handles, click a button, and after a bit of data crunching, the “slugfest for supremacy” begins. Being the geek that I am, I’ve tried out visual.ly a few times but was always disappointed when the site timed out on me.

So imagine my excitement when, on Friday, I ran across  a “Twitter Account Showdown” comparing the twitter feeds of my firm and another firm.

Above the Law dubbed it “the biglaw twitter wars,” blogging about it to almost no fanfare.  Certainly the chart is of great interest to me and others in my role, but to the rest of the world? Yeah. Zzzzz.

Needless to say, I found it fascinating. I spent some time looking at the numbers and the actual tweets and twitter histories of both firms, I came up with a few insights gleaned from this  “slugfest for #supremacy” (Visual.ly’s words, not mine). Read on to learn more and to see the infographic.

The two sections that excited me the most were “Level of Tweet Engagement” and “Tweet Timing.”

Level of tweet engagement

As the bar chart makes plentifully clear, our “@ mentions” (instances in which our handle appears in other people’s tweets) are pretty low and fluctuate wildly from week to week. The other firm’s @ mentions are mind-bogglingly high – but oddly consistent. Around 260 each week.

Strangely though, our mentions per tweet were over double the other firms. How could this be when our mentions were so low?

The answer is tweet volume – something Visual.ly leaves out of the infographic.

In spite of being launched within months of one another, the other firm’s account has almost 34,000 tweets to our 1,890. That’s a ratio of 17 to 1! So the net effect is that their mentions are diluted by their volume of tweets.

Tweet Timing

Clearly, the other firm’s tweeting effort is a well-oiled machine, with regular tweets throughout the week – clustered densely during business hours – and even on the weekend.  Indeed, since I started following the other firm on Friday, they have tweeted once an hour throughout Saturday and Sunday. They also frequently repeat tweets (giving content more mileage) and tag themselves in their tweets (hence the high number of mentions).

And now the takeaway

While both firms use Hootesuite (you can tell by the “ow.ly” links in the twitter feeds), the other firm is probably using an upgraded version that allows them to schedule tweets in bulk. The Enterprise version of Hootesuite goes for around $1500 a month, so I’m guessing they use Pro – a bargain at ten bucks a month.

The data visualization also gave me a few things to think about:

• Should we tweet more often?
• Should we tweet the same content more than once? How many times?
• Should we “@ mention” ourselves?
• Should we tweet round the clock?
• What is the best time to tweet?

Thankfully with social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, it’s very easy to change up the strategy and measure results.

So who was the winner in the “biglaw twitter war?” Without a doubt, the winner of the “biglaw twitter wars” was biglaw social media managers! Thanks to this infographic, Sophia Lisa Salazar of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog (and social media manager of the “opposing” firm in the twitter war), reached out to me to introduce herself. How lucky am I? She seems like a genuinely interesting and industrious person and I’m looking forward to getting to know her better.

So there you have it. An all-out brawl for Twitter dominance ends in geek unity – as all great social media interactions should.