Expert says Experimentation is the Key to Successful Twitter Marketing

Guy Kawasaki is famous as the man who led Apple to many of its brilliant marketing moves. His common-sense advice includes tweaking your Twitter presence to see what works for your firm.

As the co-founder of Alltop.com, Kawasaki uses Twitter almost constantly to promote his popular aggregation site. In fact, he says, “If I’m on the computer, I’m on Twitter, and I’m on a computer eight hours per day.” That’s a big commitment for a busy accounting professional, but it pays off for Kawasaki. This marketing mogul and self-titled “Apple evangelist” shares his approach to marketing through Twitter for businesses of all sizes in an article published in SmartBusinessOnline. Here’s some of what he had to say about the platform and the best way to use it for marketing your firm:

• Find content through aggregator sites. Coming up with interesting content to share is one of the basics. He relies on major aggregators like StumbleUpon, SmartBrief and Alltop (his own). You can tailor this strategy by setting search parameters to find financially focused articles. Use the ones that interest you, fit your niche and are of the highest quality for your accounting firm’s Twitter sharing.
• Follow your followers. He gives two reasons: common courtesy and to allow direct messaging, which makes it easy to have a one-to-one conversation without having to exchange email information.
• Repeat your tweets. This lets more followers have a chance to see the content you’re sharing. Not everyone will like the repetition, but since you’re putting in the time and effort to offer relevant information it’s worth it to maximize your followers’ exposure.
• Answer your own @ messages and direct messages but feel free to use ghost-written content and retweet great posts by others for the firm’s account. Otherwise, producing Twitter content becomes a full-time job.
• Promotion, content and interaction need to be in balance. The correct balance will be different for each firm. All three, however, are elements of a successful Twitter marketing effort. “You can think of my tweets as PBS content and the accompanying Alltop promotion as the fundraising telethon.”
• It only takes one person to create and maintain an active and effective Twitter presence, but that person needs to work hard. Also, the firm’s Twitter representative needs to be “unencumbered by a clueless boss and a Luddite legal department.” This last condition isn’t likely to be a problem if you’re a small firm or a sole practitioner.
• There are no clear rules. Other than the normal rules of civil communication, there is no correct protocol for using the platform to market your accounting firm. As Kawasaki says, “The bottom line is that there’s only what works and what doesn’t, and you won’t know which is which until you try.”

All of these strategies are sensible guides that fall in line with what we and others have found to be successful in content marketing through Twitter. Are there other ideas you’ve learned by using the platform to promote your brand? Please share your experience and let us know what worked for your accounting firm. Like all social media marketing, it’s an experimental journey users and marketers are making together. We know it’s effective and we’re enjoying finding so many interesting new ideas along the way.