What's Twitter And How Can It Help Me Market My Accounting Firm?
There's a lot of debate nowadays about the marketing value of Twitter
. Amongst number crunchers the opinion is that the ROI of twitter is too low to warrant it's use. On the other side there are other marketers who scoff at trying to quantify the ROI of websites like twitter. Where you stand is your call, but I'm disposed to concur with the pro-Twitter camp.
Of course a lot of us might be asking what the heck Twitter is in the first place. How does it affect your CPA or accounting Practice?
In the most basic possible terms it allows it's members to send short notes, called "Tweets", to their followers. It is a hugely successful and popular instance of what is generally known as a "social networking site". Don't confuse this with Email. No receiver is designated when you "Tweet". Your friends, or "followers", each have their own homepage and it will be added to it so they can see it the next time they log in. The notes themselves, however, are circulated publicly for all the world to see.
So what's the actual sales capability of Twitter? There are a lot strategies you can make use of. Let's talk first about client retention.
A lot of of your clients already use Twitter, and that in itself is a sound reason to use it yourself. By following them you are displaying a concern about their lives. As a rule people on Twitter want that.
Twitter also gives you an excellent opportunity to maintain your brand in front of your clients. You can use your tweets to show them how hard you are working for them in a way that feels personal to them. You will also gain knowledge of things about your clients that you would not otherwise be privy to just by keeping up with their tweets. You'll often find it appropriate to respond to a tweet on a more private level. I'm not just talking about catching a client tweeting about accounting problems that you can help them or their friends with. That may happen, but not too regularly. I'm talking about their private lives. As an accountant you are oftentimes not privy to events like births, graduations, and deaths in time to send out suitable congratulations or condolences. Twitter can put you in the loop.
Not many people will contend that good old-fashioned personal contact isn't great for client retention.
Lastly, all tweets are public. While they are posted to to your followers' home pages they also appear on Twitter's master homepage, at least for a few seconds. There are programs you can use that will allow you to keep watch over this feed of material and warn you if anyone sends out a tweet about, for example, you or your company. It's a terrific way to not only detect the clients that are giving confirming referrals, but to catch gripes in time to fix them.
This is a primary basis for why I don't figure Twitter lends itself to a traditional ROI computation. I don't presume that it's honestly workable to add up the dollar value of these kinds of customer retention techniques. In the defense of Twitter's various and frequently respected skeptics, there's likewise no way to show with any certainty that they succeed either.
When considering client acquisition things turn even more nebulous, but this is where I see Twitter has the opportunity to genuinely shine.
How do you receive new clients with twitter? Like before, there's a lot of strategies.
Twitter lets you to place links in your tweets. This not only drives visitors to your website, if the content you're linking to is desirable there's a good chance some of your friends will "ReTweet" it. In plain English; they will forward it to their friends. This works terrifically if you have a blog, but even if you don't you could just drive them to a free guide on your website, (for example) "How to get Top Dollar for Your House". There's a good chance that many of your followers are familiar with at least one individual who's selling a house. If so they may ReTweet it, and this tweet will be circulated not just to the home owner who's selling, but to ALL the ReTweeter's followers, too. It will reveal your brand to a lot of new people if even a few of your tweets go "viral" like this.
Without getting overly distracted with technical nitty-gritty: they don't offer any "Page Rank" but they do carry a small amount of "Domain Authority" and facilitate the search engines in detecting and indexing new pages.
Now I have made my living doing professional CPA Website Design for lots of years, so what I'm about to impart may sound self-defeating at first blush. It's not, though, because I purpose my websites with this selling paradigm in mind: A well concieved CPA or accounting website is built to be a networking tool.
Why?
The quickest, sharpest, most successful business owners don't, as a rule, pick their CPA willy-nilly from Bing searches or the yellow pages. The best prospects locate their CPA by networking. They reach out to you because an individual they know and have faith in vouched for you. Using the identical reasoning sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are a spontaneous online evolution of traditional network marketing, and as such merit deep respect as marketing tools.
by: Brian O'Connell
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