Much Ado About Twitter: What's the real marketing value for your CPA firm?

There's a lot of argument nowadays about the marketing value of Twitter. Does the ROI justify the time spent on Twitter? Many number crunchers say "no". On the other side there are trendy marketers who jeer at trying to measure the ROI of instruments like twitter. I stand fervently with the marketing professionals who see an advantage to social marketing, but in the long run you'll have to decide for yourself where you stand.

First things first... What is Twitter? Is it honestly something that can help you grow a CPA practice?

Twitter is a social networking site. It allows it's members to send short messages to their friends called "Tweets". This is thoroughly dissimilar to email. You don't get to select who will view your "Tweets". Instead they are circulated publicly for everyone see. Your friends, or "followers", each have their own feed page, however, and your note will be added to it so they can read it the next time they log in.

So how can Twitter help you sell your CPA practice? There are many strategies you can practice. Let's talk first about client retention.

A lot of of your clients already use Twitter, and that in itself is a good reason to use it yourself. By following them you are exhibiting an interest in their lives. As a rule individuals on Twitter want that.

Twitter also offers you a great chance to get your brand in front of your clients. Even if a tweet is truthfully a rather impersonal technique, it feels personal. By tweeting now and then you are sending them the message that you are thinking about them and working hard for them. Likewise, by keeping up with your clients' tweets you can keep in touch with their lives, and when appropriate, contact them more personally about notable events in their lives that you otherwise might not be privy to. I'm not just talking about catching a client tweeting about accounting problems that you can help them or their friends with. That most likely won't happen especially often. I'm talking about their private lives. You are often not privy to events like marriages, graduations, and deaths in time to send out proper congratulations or condolences. As accountants we're ordinarily not the first to discover this kind of tidings, but it's exactly the kind of thing people tend to tweet. Twitter will put you in the loop.

Very few would contend that good old-fashioned personal contact isn't fantastic for client retention.

Finally, all tweets are public. Not only do they post on all your followers Twitter welcome pages, they are also posted to the site's main homepage (at least for a moment or two) there are tools you can use that will allow you to keep watch over this stream of data and email you if anyone sends out a tweet about, for example, you or your company. It's a wonderful way to not only find the clients that are offering positive referrals, but to overhear gripes in time to deal with them.

This is a principal grounds for why I don't suppose Twitter lends itself to a traditional ROI calculation. I don't trust that it's genuinely workable to measure the dollar value of these types of customer retention strategies. In the defense of Twitter's numerous and oftentimes respected naysayers, there's also no way to demonstrate with any certainty that they succeed either.

When deliberating client acquisition things get even more muddy, but this is where I submit Twitter has the opportunity to really shine.

How do you catch new clients with twitter? Again... there are many ways.

You can put back links in your tweets. This can be used to drive visits to your website, and (if the information you're linking to is worthy) there's a fine chance some of your friends will "ReTweet" it, meaning they will forward it to their followers. If you have a business blog this works terrifically, but you could always link to a free guide on your website. For example... suppose we link to a guide called "How to Get Top Dollar for Your Home". There's a good chance that a number of of your followers happen to know at least one home owner who's selling a house. If so they might ReTweet it, and this tweet will be broadcast not just to the person who's selling, but to ALL the ReTweeter's followers also. It will reveal your brand to a lot of prospects if even a few of your tweets go "viral" like this.

The links in tweets also have a little bit of "SEO" (search engine optimization) benefit. Without getting excessively knocked off track with technical details: they don't offer any "Page Rank" but they do pass a little bit of "Domain Authority" and assist the search engines in noticing 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 posit may appear self-defeating at the outset. It isn't though. I purpose my sites with this marketing paradigm in mind. A well considered CPA website is constructed to be a networking tool.

Why?

The smartest, savviest, most successful business owners don't, ordinarily, pick their CPA haphazardly from Bing searches or the local phone book. The best prospects find their accountant by networking. They reach out to you because a person they know and hold in high regard endorsed you. Using the same logic sites like Twitter and Facebook are a natural online evolution of traditional network marketing, and as such merit  serious regard as marketing tools.