Simple Tips for Using Twitter to Promote Websites for Accountants

Twitter is good at promoting websites for accountants and tempting prospects into accounting firms. You can exploit it to advertise your website and to keep in contact with your customers and friends in a way that you could not do before. Here are some pointers on how you can do that effectively.

Twitter and Search Engine Optimization:
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. This will give you a search engine optimization (or "SEO") benefit. Search engines love this kind of "realtime" feedback on page relevance and over time these links will improve your website's 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. Sounds great, but do not do it! It's best to Tweet the old fashioned way. Just log in and type it up. If you publish something impersonal, your Twitter account will just seem like a faceless promotion machine. Link to the very best stuff on your blog, engage people on Twitter.

Stay Informed:
I've never been a trendy guy. This tended to leave me kind of clueless around the water cooler... until I started to help manage our twitter feed. Twitter makes it easy to find out what's "trending" and see what people are saying or thinking about current topics.

Mentions:
Monitor the public feed for "mentions". If someone mentions you or your firm take the time to reply. 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. A lot of companies have the whole social networking thing bass ackwards and many even block sites like Facebook and twitter at the router. Instead, try encouraging your staff and/or departments to set up individual accounts. This will not only get more interaction, but better SEO.

Promote:
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. Use this strategy carefully. 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.

Stick to the Plan: 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.

Keep Your Clients in Mind:
This is a key principle. Do not just talk about your firm, products, and services. Customer experience is the best solution on Twitter. 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. Most customers want a company to have personality, to be understanding. 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. Link to interesting or funny stories about accounting. The idea isn't to sell services. The idea is to get people 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. Unlike traditional marketing and sales outlets social media offers a large audience for free. Accountants have traditionally relied heavily on network marketing. This makes twitter, and social marketing in general, a great addition to your marketing tool box. Like any tool there's a right way to use it. It can easily become a waste of time and money if you are not using it correctly.

There are still lots of folks who don't use Twitter or even Facebook. Don't anticipate miracles but these unique new markets are developing fast. The sooner you begin the better off your firm will be in the long run.

Kenneth T. Marshall is a consultant and former Vice President of CPA Site Solutions, one of the United States' leading edge website businesses dedicated solely to websites for accountants.