80 Ways for Accountants to Use Twitter

Answering the question: “What can Twitter do for you?”

Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media, Inc. says small businesses like accounting firms can use Twitter as a way “to find new leads, build relationships, and as an overall way to cost effectively market their business.”

Here she lists 80 ways small businesses are using Twitter. Some may work for your firm, too.

Build Credibility

1. Answer common customer questions
2. Share insight and opinion
3. Pass on interesting links/posts
4. Tweet links showing your company featured on other Web sites or mainstream media
5. Tweet often to keep your brand in customer’s top of mind
6. Share high quality content that is relevant to your customers needs
7. Share information about your organization that customers, colleagues and others may be interested to know
8. Promote competitors when they deserve it
9. Tweet links to Slideshare presentations or videos of speaking engagements.
10. Promote upcoming speaking engagements
11. Mention awards you’ve won or accreditations you’ve earned
12. Be the one to break the news in your industry
13. Live-tweet events

Market Your Business

1. Talk about company culture and values
2. Let people know the events your company will be attending this year
3. Offer discounts, coupons or special offers to customers who find you via social media
4. Offer discounts on conferences for folks who come to hear you speak
5. Show your human face
6. Talk about what you’re doing
7. Talk about who you are
8. Talk about why you do what you do
9. To get blog subscribers
10. Direct traffic to your site
11. Find referrals
12. Offer referrals
13. Connect vendors to one another
14. Hold contests
15. Highlight employees
16. Publish your Twitter handle on all direct mailings, email newsletters, on your Web site and all other marketing channels. Put it everywhere
17. Promote your latest blog posts and newsletters
18. Share reviews people have left about your site that made you laugh. Or smile
19. Tweet when you do something cool
20. Admit and apologize for flubs to help neutralize the impact
21. Be excited about your week
22. Ask for votes on social media sites (use sparingly)

Grow Ears

1. Track conversations about your brand for online reputation management
2. Track your most important keywords and subscribe to an RSS feed
3. Listen in on conversations about your general industry
4. Do free market research to see what people want/don’t want
5. Conduct Twitter polls to quiz consumer opinion
6. Learn about what’s working/not working for your competitors
7. See how your competitors are interacting with customers
8. Find out who your competitors are talking to and do some competitive intelligence
9. Track conversation patterns for your industry to determine when people are most active online
10. Identify Twitter trends or hot topics related to your industry
11. Find ways to connect what you do with what’s already trending on Twitter
12. Ask people for their opinions. Listen to them
13. Notify customers of any holdups, mishaps or things that may affect business

Grow Your Online Network

1. Connect more personally with contacts from other social networks
2. Use relationship building instead of cold calls and cheesy flyers
3. Use Twellow or Listorious to find people with common interests
4. Fill out your Twellow and We Follow profiles to make it easy for people to find you
5. Use Twitter search to find relevant conversations you can jump into
6. Find gues tbloggers for your blog
7. Find guest blogging opportunities for yourself
8. Meet influencers and your ‘industry famous’. Talk to them
9. Mend fences with angry tweeters by following the conversation and offering to help when possible
10. Host weekly Twitter chats to bring your community together and meet new folks
11. Connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. And to your Facebook account. And to your Web site. And anywhere else you can to make your site more social
12. Participate in Follow Friday to meet new people…and to encourage others to recommend you, as well
13. Use services like bit.ly to see how people are interacting with your content
14. Discover what actions cause an increase in followers and are important social metrics

Grow Your Offline Network

1. Hold tweetups and introduce your community members in real life
2. Find new customers by using the Advanced Search to track down local conversations
3. Use Twitter Search to track when potential customers mention a competitor…and then reach out to them
4. Offer coupons to encourage community members to make purchases instore
5. Tweet about products just arriving or hot food coming out of the oven
6. Throw a Valentine’s Day party for your Twitter followers
7. Ask Twitter followers to leave testimonials on your site
8. Find new employees

Have Fun

1. Become a better writer
2. Share content that makes you laugh
3. Find content that inspires and motivates you
4. Learn new things, related to your industry or not.
5. Make friendships, not just professional relationships.
6. Create in jokes with community members
7. Find new blog topic ideas
8. Get out of your marketing shell and be yourself
9. Use it as your office water cooler if you work from home
10. Make it your own co-working space

via Small Business Trends

13 Responses to “80 Ways for Accountants to Use Twitter”

  1. Michael 'MC' Carter

    That would have to be one of the most value-packed blog posts I have read in a long time. Thanks Rick, thanks Lisa. Here’s an idea … we could do a 3-way webinar (Rick, Lisa, me) actually showing people on screen how to do a number of these things, as there is implied know-how in a number of them, that a newbie to social media would value being shown on screen step-by-step exactly how to do them. Part of what we do in teaching marketing to accounting firms is get down to the nitty gritty details of the ‘how to’ – e.g. how to set up a Twitter account, how to set up software to make it easy to monitor (e.g. TweetDeck), etc. Rick, let me know if you’d be interested in doing that webinar. Cheers,MC (P.S. I heard on the grapevine you had a chat with Paul Dunn recently. It’s inspiring what he’s doing with Guy1Give1 and his ‘Accountants for Good’ movement.)

  2. Tweets that mention 80 Ways for Accountants to Use Twitter : CPA Trendlines -- Topsy.com

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  3. Brooke

    One thing I’d like to mention is that you shouldn’t ‘tweet’ too often. I had some people that I was following that set up a feed and it sent out messages all day and night non stop. There were no breaks in the day at all.

  4. [...] Mentioned on Twitter by Sarah Foster, PHR, Nate Hagerty. Nate Hagerty said: 80 ways for accountants to use Twitter: http://ow.ly/2ik2X A good list, but maybe TOO long for practical implementation. [...]

    […] Mentioned on Twitter by Sarah Foster, PHR, Nate Hagerty. Nate Hagerty said: 80 ways for accountants to use Twitter: http://ow.ly/2ik2X A good list, but maybe TOO long for practical implementation. […]

  5. Nate Hagerty

    That’s a long list! Maybe TOO long, for practical implementation. But yes–this stuff is here to stay. Accountants and Tax Practitioners should be tweeting *daily*.

    Having managed this stuff for 60+ tax & CPA firms, though, I know that most of them don’t yet see the full value and/or they just don’t have the time! It’s too bad, though…

  6. Aubrey Jayroe

    To tweet as an accountant is great but what about Circular 230 rules. We are required to have a disclaimer on emails… why not twitter?

  7. Mathew Heggem

    AMAZING!!! The most clear and comprehensive list I’ve read ever!

  8. Shannon Tucker

    Great list, thanks!

    “Promote competitors when they deserve it”: A good example of social media differentiating from traditional brand marketing.

  9. jefkalil

    Always great info from Rick. After just coming from a great conference session with @equalman – social media is not a fad. This should help some accounting marketing professionals rock!

    Remember:
    Listen. Interact. React. Sell. Repeat.

    @jefkalil

  10. Heather MacDonald-Santiago

    Very insightful. I plan to take this back to our Social Media team.

  11. June Ball, CPA

    Great article! Thanks, Rick!

  12. Eric Majchrzak

    What a comprehensive list. Thanks Rick!