Twitter is great at promoting websites for accountants and tempting prospects into CPA practices. Twitter is an innovative way to stay in contact with each other. It can help us stay in contact with clients, fans, and prospects in a brand new way. Here are some pointers on the best ways to do that successfully.
Tweets are a Good Link Source:
Don’t overdo it, but this is REALLY important. Use your website or (better yet) blog to post your ideas and messages and use your Tweets to link to them. Google and Bing monitor these links and over time you’ll improve your search engine ranking.
Post Manually:
There are lot’s of shortcuts for posting on Twitter. For example one popular app, TwitterFeed, lets you post blog entries and links directly to Twitter. These can be a huge time saver, but I don’t recommend using them. It’s best to Tweet the old fashioned way. Just log in and type it up. If you auto post your feed will lose the personal touch that is one of the keys to Twitter’s charm. It will take on the character of a faceless promotion and your followers will trickle away over time. Really try to engage people.
Stay Hip:
Twitter is a great way to find out what people are talking about. Twitter makes it easy to find out what’s “trending” and see what people are saying or thinking about current topics.
Watch for Mentions:
Reply to your tweets that mention you, when relevant. Don’t be surprised if people talk about your practice as if it’s a person. Actually, this is a pretty good sign that you’re doing something right. This tells you you’ve managed to give your brand a personality of it’s own.
Let Everyone Throw In:
Being part of a big company can be a very good thing when it comes to Twitter accounts. You can start individual accounts for different sections of your company. This will spread your tweets out to a much wider audience, and a larger audience means more backlinks. This will improve your website’s search engine ranking.
Promotional Offers Rock:
Another way to engage people is to offer prizes or even just shout-outs to your followers. Give away a dinner for two at a local restaurant or a gift certificate for a local business. This will allow you to promote not only your own firm, but your clients, too. Be careful. This strategy is really effective, but I’ve seen it backfire. If you offer discounted tax preparation to your twitter followers and one of your other clients finds out after he was billed full-price you could find yourself opening a pretty lively can of worms.
Plan it out:
Don’t try to wing it. It is easy to lose track of what you wanted to do. Set aside a few minutes each day for Twitter, and stick to it.
Make it About Them:
OK, when I do a list like this the first and last items are the most important. This is the last item. Don’t bore your followers. Obviously many of your tweets should be about accounting and taxes, but find some other things to talk about, too. Get involved with trending discussions. Above all else the Twitter experience should be fun. Most people are fed up with the amount advertising they have to muddle through every day. The whole idea behind using Twitter to promote websites for accountants is to make it look and feel less like advertising. If you’re doing the job right your feed should be fun. It should have a sense of character and humor. A lot of customers want to hear what is best for them, what can you offer them as a company, how can you help them? Local sales, specials and discounts make for good tweets. So do local shows, fairs, and other events. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t be talking about takes and accounting. You certainly should, but do it with some panache. Make it fun and informative. We all know dozens of acidulous accounting stories. We should be sharing this silliness. This gives customers reasons to like and trust you. You want to give people the feeling that you’re really thinking of them, and the best way to give them that impression is to really think of them.
As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, and much more. Having the opportunity to tell your customers about attractive sales and your new products/services, can be done free Just by using Twitter. It’s becoming important for accountants to learn the guidelines for Twitter and how it should be used. Of course, Twitter is like any other tool. It only works if you know how to use it. If you don’t use it right your chances of grievous physical injury may not be very high, but there’s a fairly high probability that you’ll wind up wasting time. Your time is altogether too valuable to waste.
Twitter is still a minor player to marketing and there are still numerous folks who don’t utilize social media. But it will be a mistake to deny that these novel new forms of connection and communication are powerful and are slowly becoming increasingly significant to today’s CPA practices.