Websites For Accountants- Online Social Networking Strategies and Twitter

We've all heard of Twitter, and lots of us are already using it. What most of us are still missing, however, is Twitter's promise as an instrument for marketing websites for accountants and our overall firms. Twitter is a novel way to connect with each other. It can help us keep in contact with clients, fans, and prospects in a whole new way. Lately some standards in Twitter marketing have begun to meld. Here are some ideas to get you started.

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.

Don't Auto-Post:

If you've got a blog that is connected to your website, you can use a service such as TwitterFeed to directly channel your new blog posts into 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 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:

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. Every time you log into twitter you'll get a quick update on what topics are trending. You can also hop onto a topic and find out what people are saying.

Watch for Mentions:

Reply to your tweets that mention you, when relevant. A lot of people will refer to your company's account as if it were a person. This tells you you've managed to give your brand a personality of it's own.

Formulate a Persona:

Think of your twitter account as a character, representing your company brand. Be chatty, whatever you decide to do. Use 'we' or 'our'. Invent a personality.

Promote:

Get people to promote you to their friends in order to win a prize or enter a sweepstakes. Give away a dinner for two at a local restaurant or a gift certificate for a local business. Use your client pool as a source of prizes. This way you're not just promoting yourself, you're also promoting your clients. Use this strategy carefully. It's been known to backlash.

Stick to the Plan:

Have a plan. Twitter is a big place, and it's a lot of fun. If you don't go in with a plan it can be a terrible time sink. Set aside a few minutes each day for Twitter, and stick to it.

Think About Your Clients:

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. 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? Tell them about things like local specials and discounts. 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.

Twitter is an exciting place. Wisdom and creativity are widespread in social media in general as companies increasingly find new ways to use it for research and communication. Unlike traditional marketing and sales outlets social media offers a large audience for free. It's becoming important for accountants to learn the guidelines for Twitter and how it should be used. Like any tool there's a right way 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 remains a newcomer to marketing and there remain numerous prospects who don't care about social media. But you can't deny that these novel new forms of connection and communication are powerful and are slowly becoming increasingly relevant to today's accounting firms.