Online Networking Tips- Marketing Websites For Accountants by Using Twitter

Twitter is great at promoting websites for accountants and alluring prospects into accounting practices. Twitter is a novel way to keep in contact with one another. It can help us keep in contact with clients, fans, and prospects in a whole new way. Lately some standards in Twitter marketing have started to become apparent. Here are some tips to get you started.

Twitter and SEO:

Don't make every post a link, but if your message is too long to squeeze into 140 characters, and many of them are, post the information on your website blog and use your tweet to link back to it. Google and Bing monitor these links and over time you'll improve your search engine ranking.

Post Manually:

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! Your business's primary Twitter feed is to be hand-typed. If you publish something impersonal, your Twitter account will just seem like a faceless promotion machine. Really try to engage people.

Know the Buzz:

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.

Use "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.

Use Multiple Accounts:

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:

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. 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.

Start With a 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. Spend your time wisely by setting aside a special time in the day just for Tweeting.

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. Do not just talk about your firm, products, and services. 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. 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? Tell them about things like local specials and discounts. And, of course, you need to keep them updated about tax changes, but even when you're talking business do it with some flair. 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. 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. It can easily become a waste of time and money if you are not using it correctly.

Twitter remains a newcomer to marketing and there are still numerous people who don't utilize social media. But don't deny that these novel new forms of getting together and talking are potent and becoming increasingly important to modern accounting practices.