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What's Twitter and Will it Help Me Grow My Accounting Firm?

Guest post by: Brian O'Connell

Article Overview: Everybody knows about the strange new force called "on line social networking", but what is it exactly? Will it help you grow your CPA, accounting or tax firm? This article looks at Twitter and reveals it's use as a sales tool.

What's Twitter and Will it Help Me Grow My Accounting Firm?

There's a lot of debate these days about the marketing value of Twitter. On one side there are a host of number crunchers and many of them appear to feel that the ROI of Twitter isn't high enough to justify it's use. Many other marketing professionals are hailing social networking sites like Twitter as the next big trend. In the end you'll have to choose for yourself where you stand, but I stand firmly with the marketers who see worth in social marketing. Let's get one worthy question out of the way. What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking site. It allows it's members to send short messages to their friends called "Tweets". This is unlike Email. When you send a "Tweet" you don't specify a receiver. It is posted publicly, and copies are automatically added to all your "followers" homepages.

How does this translate to more billable hours? There are actually several strategies you can make use of. Client retention is a good place to get started.

The first strong reason to use Twitter is merely that your many of your clients use it. They will like that you're showing an interest in their lives by following them and that you've taken the time to join a community that has significance to them.

Twitter also gives you a terrific chance to put your brand in front of your clients. Even if a tweet is, in point of fact, a rather impersonal advance, it feels personal. By tweeting periodically you are sending them the message that you are thinking about them and working hard for them. You will also discover things about your clients that you would not otherwise be privy to just by paying attention to their tweets. You'll often find it appropriate to answer a tweet on a more intimate level. I'm not just talking about catching a client tweeting about accounting problems that you can help them or their friends with. That proabably won't happen very often. I'm talking about their "real" lives. As an accountant you are often not privy to subjects like marriages, graduations, and deaths in time to send out proper congratulations or condolences. Twitter can put you in the loop.

Nobody would argue that simple personal contact isn't terrific for client retention.

Lastly, all tweets are public. Not only do they appear on all your followers Twitter welcome pages, they are also posted to the site's primary homepage (at least for a shake of a cat's tail or two) there are programs you can use that will allow you to watch this stream of material and alert you if anyone sends out a tweet about, for example, you or your company. It's a terrific way to not only discover the clients that are giving positive referrals, but to overhear gripes in time to address them.

Accuratetly finding Twitters ROI seems improbable to me. Can you really tot up the dollar value of these kinds of client retention strategies? I've never met a client that tracked his conversions closely enough to say "yes" to that question. In deference to Twitter's numerous and oftentimes well-thought-of naysayers, there's likewise no way to show without doubt that they accomplish something either.

Things get even more murky when you contemplate client acquisition, but this is where I present that Twitter has an opportunity to truly shine.

So what's the trick for procuring new clients with Twitter? Again... there are countless strategies.

You can put links in your tweets. This not only drives visits to your website, if the information you're linking to is valuable there's a decent chance some of your friends will "ReTweet" it. In plain English; they will forward it to their followers. This works particularly well if you have a blog, but even if you don't you could always just direct them to a free guide. For example you may have a guide about, "How to get Top Dollar for Your House". There's a good chance that many of your friends are acquainted with at least one person who's selling a house. If so they may ReTweet it, and this tweet will be circulated not just to the person who's selling, but to ALL the ReTweeter's friends as well. It will present your brand to a lot of prospects if any of your tweets go "viral" like this.

The links in tweets also have a little bit of search engine optimization (or "SEO") value. Without getting too distracted with technical nitty-gritty: they don't return any "Page Rank" but they do offer a little "Domain Authority" and aid the search engines in finding and indexing new pages.

Now I have made a good living doing professional CPA Website Design for a number of years, so what I'm about to give away may give the impression of being self-defeating at first. It isn't though. I pattern my websites with this marketing philosophy in mind. A well thought out CPA website is built to be a networking tool.

The smartest, most astute, most successful business owners don't, as a rule, pick their CPA or accountant indiscriminately from Google searches or the phone book. The very best prospects select their CPA or accountant by networking. They contact you because a person they know and respect vouched for you. Sites like Twitter and Linkedin are a material online evolution of traditional network marketing, and as such, merit great respect as marketing tools.

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Article Tags: Accounting, Accounting Websites, CPA, CPA Website, CPA Websites, Design, Marketing, Twitter, Website, Websites



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Re: Using Twitter To Double Your Traffic? - I'm sure in many cases Twitter sends more traffic than Search Engines because most people don't have good enough SE rankings to get SE traffic. But anyone can get Twitter traffic. The problem is that Twitter traffic won't convert for the most part and SE traffic will. I'd venture to say that 98% of the time getting just 100 visitors from search is better than getting 2000+ from Twitter.
Re: My 3 best business books - 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill 2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey 3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl: [i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom] Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
How to Use Twitter to Market Products? - How do you use Twitter to market products? Has the Twitter route given you good results? Please share your experience and ideas on how to use Twitter to take a product to the customers. Thank you in advance.


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