Tweeting Utilities That Can Help You Market Your CPA Site
Been hearing a whole lot about Twitter of late? I know I've been discussing it a unremittingly. Twitter is the newest golden child of internet marketing, and not without good reason. It doesn't honestly matter what you're selling. Twitter has enough users that you're probably going to find customers there no matter how obscure your product is, and by keeping track of tweets these users are easy to identify. Service professionals like CPAs, however, will find twitter a far more valuable prospecting tool than, say, retail or hospitality businesses. You'll find this online environment teeming with colleagues, clients, and prospects. If you're not familiar with this new social marketing tool you're falling behind. Take some time to learn about it. There is a good article about it here.
The only problem with twitter is that it can quickly become overwhelming. If you're already marketing to all the "tweeple" out there you are no doubt dealing with these challenges. There's a lot of noise on Twitter and picking through it for tweets and finding references worth engaging can be a surprising amount of work.
For those who aren't familiar with geek-speak, "noise" is online lingo. It refers to useless information. A tweet like "I had Ham Salad for lunch... mmmmm" would be noise. Nobody cares. Unless you sell ham salad this isn't a useful tweet.
Let me offer you a little bit of free advice. Don't be the guy making noise. Keep your posts relevant. When you make a post it will appear on your friends pages, and they really don't want you cluttering up their page with a half dozen useless posts a day. Making noise is a great way to get people to stop following you.
This deluge of data can be managed. There are a number of applications that have been developed to help you navigate this new environment.
There are two ways to access Twitter. Most people just log in through the Twitter website. Obviously you should assume this is how most of your followers are viewing your posts. Consider this the main method of accessing the service. It's certainly not the only way, though. There are also a variety of third party programs for use with your desktop, notebook, or mobile device. Not only do these present a more stylish interface, they often have tools that make your journey more orderly. We'll explore a few of these.
TweetDeck
One is TweetDeck, originally from the creators of Seesmic Desktop (an earlier incarnation of the same application). With this program, you can log in to and manage multiple accounts, organized in columns, of which the default includes all friends, mentions, and direct messages.
TweetDeck also allows you to follow trending topics, one of the marketer's best friends. Finally, it has also been expanded to support Facebook and Foursquare. You can even access hash tag searches quickly and easily. Best of all, the program is free.
Tweetie and Twitterific
If you're looking for a simpler solution there are a lot of choices. Tweetie and Twitterific are the most popular choices. Both can be run without a license, but it's not really freeware. If you don't pay you will have to deal with pop-up ads. These programs bear the standard trademarks of the Twitter client, with easy access to mentions and direct messages.
TwitWipe
One challenge with Twitter is the how cumbersome it is to delete tweets. Under normal circumstances, the only way to do this is by logging in and deleting the tweets by hand. Deleting one or two is easy - but when you want to change your Twitter's focus—say, from tweets about debt to tweets about credit - it could involve deleting hundreds, or even thousands, of tweets. Needless to say, this is really time-consuming.
Fortunately, there's a freeware application that will make this easier and more cost effective for you. TwitWipe is a web-based utility that allows you to delete as many tweets as you need in a single operation. You can get it free at it's website: twitwipe.com.
Warnings: You won't be able to keep selected tweets. Twitwipe is a weapon of mass destruction. It deletes everything. As far as I know, there isn't any way to pick and choose between your tweets. Also, be warned. The website looks like t was built by an angry teenager rather than a professional coder. The guy is crude and has absolutely no talent for marketing. He drops the F-Bomb and cusses like a schoolboy all over his website. If you need to delete a bunch of tweets, however, you might want to harden your sensibilities and grab it. Twitwipe works as advertised.
Get Organized and then Get Started
Twitter is a fantastic marketing tool. Using these programs you'll learn it's fun and easy to expose your service to scores, even hundreds or thousands, of eager new prospective clients without being overwhelmed. Twitter now has somewhere around 75 million users worldwide.
How many of these users, do you think, might have a earnest need for your CPA service?
About the Author
Brian O'Connell is the President and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's most successful companies oriented entirely to CPASites. His firm at present provides websites for more than 4000 CPA and accounting firms.