LAURADEWSONLINE.COM

Twitter’s marketing value is being hotly debated these days. Can the ROI justify the time spent on Twitter? Many number crunchers say “no”. Other marketers see a huge potential in network marketing instruments like Twitter. I stand firmly with the marketers who see worth in social marketing, but at the end of the day you’ll have to decide for yourself where you stand.

Of course a lot of us might be asking what the heck Twitter is in the first place. How can it help you grow your CPA Practice?

Twitter is a social networking site that enables it’s members to send quick notes to their followers called “Tweets”. Don’t confuse this with Email. No recipient is assigned when you “Tweet”. Copies are added to all your “followers” feed pages, but they are also circulated publicly.

So how does Twitter help you grow your accounting practice? There are actually quite a few techniques you can exploit. First let’s talk about client retention.

A lot of of your clients already use Twitter, and that in itself is a strong reason to use it yourself. They will appreciate you taking the time to join in their community and will take note that you’re showing an interest in their lives by following them.

Keeping your brand in front of clients is also very easy on Twitter. You can use your tweets to show them how hard you are working for them in a way that feels personal to them. Another advantage is that by monitoring your clients’ tweets you will gain knowledge of things about them that you might not otherwise be privy to, and be able to contact them more directly when appropriate. I’m not just talking about catching a client tweeting about accounting problems that you can help them or their friends with. That will only happen every so often. I’m talking about their “real” lives. You are oftentimes not privy to things like births, marriages, graduations, and deaths in time to send out appropriate congratulations or condolences. As accountants we’re generally not the first to get this kind of news, but it’s precisely the kind of thing people tend to tweet. Twitter is able to put you in the loop.

Not many people will argue that simple personal contact isn’t excellent for client retention.

Finally, all tweets are public. While they are posted to to your followers’ home pages they also appear on Twitter’s index page, at least for a few seconds. There are applications you can use that will permit you to keep watch over this flow of data and email you if anybody sends out a tweet about, for example, you or one of your associates. It’s an outstanding way to not only discover the clients that are giving positive referrals, but to catch gripes in time to fix them.

This is a primary grounds for why I don’t figure Twitter lends itself to a traditional ROI calculation. I don’t believe that it’s honestly possible to determine the dollar value of these types of customer retention techniques. In the defense of Twitter’s numerous and frequently well-thought-of naysayers, there’s likewise no way to prove definitively that they work out either.

When mulling over client acquisition things get even more obscure, but this is where I put forward Twitter has the opportunity to actually shine.

So what’s the trick for obtaining new clients with Twitter? Again… there are loads of techniques.

Twitter permits you to put links in your posts. This can be used to drive visitors to your website, and (if the material you’re linking to is desirable) there’s a fair chance some of your followers will “ReTweet” it, meaning they will forward it to their followers. This works really well if you have a blog, but even if you don’t you can steer them to a free report on your website, (just as an example) “How to get Top Dollar for Your House”. If a few of your friends know somebody who’s selling a house there’s a good possibility they’ll “ReTweet” it, broadcasting it not just to the home owner that’s selling, but to ALL the ReTweeter’s twitter followers, too. Tweets can, and repeatedly do, “go viral”; and this can acquaint your brand to a lot of people.

There is a little bit of search engine optimization (“SEO”) value to tweeted backlinks, also. I won’t get overly into this because I don’t want to get distracted with technical minutiae. Succinctly: tweet links don’t pass any “Page Rank” but they do return a little “Domain Authority” and help the search engines in locating and indexing new pages.

Now I have made my good living doing professional CPA Website Design for about ten years, so what I’m about to posit may appear self-defeating at the outset. It’s not, though, because I plan my websites with this marketing paradigm in mind: A great CPA or accounting website is constructed to be a networking tool.

Why?

The quickest, shrewdest, most successful business owners don’t, commonly, pick their CPA arbitrarily from Google searches or the yellow pages. The most outstanding prospects locate their CPA by networking. They reach out to you because somebody they know and respect recommended you. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are a spontaneous online evolution of traditional network marketing, and as such, merit fervent respect as marketing tools.