Twitter's marketing value is being heatedly debated these days. Will the ROI justify the time spent on Twitter? Many number crunchers say "no". Twitter also has a lot of converts, however. A number of marketers are heralding it as the next grand trend in marketing. I stand solidly with the marketers who see an advantage to social marketing, but in the long run you'll have to decide for yourself where you stand.

OK, so what is Twitter, anyway?

In the simplest possible terms it enables it's members to transmit short messages, called "Tweets", to their followers. It is a hugely successful and popular representative of what is generally known as a "social networking site". Do not confuse this with Email. No recipient is specified when you "Tweet". Copies are posted to all your "followers" home pages, but they are also posted publicly.

How does this translate to sales? There are many strategies you can take advantage of. Client retention is a good place to start.

A lot of of your clients already use Twitter. That, in itself, is a good reason to use it yourself. By following them you are expressing a concern about their lives. As a rule folks on Twitter want that.

Twitter also offers you a terrific opportunity to keep your brand in front of your clients. You can use your tweets to show them how hard you are working for them in a way that feels personal to them. Likewise, by keeping up with your clients' tweets you can keep in touch with their lives, and when appropriate, contact them more personally about worthy events in their lives that you otherwise might not be privy to. I'm not just talking about catching a client tweeting about accounting problems that you can help them or their friends with. That happens, but only infrequently. I'm talking about their lives. You are oftentimes not privy to subjects like births, marriages, graduations, and deaths in time to send out appropriate congratulations or condolences. As accountants we're usually not the first to learn this kind of news, but it's just the kind of thing people tend to tweet. Twitter can put you in the loop.

Who would argue that simple personal contact isn't terrific for client retention?

Lastly, all tweets are public. They are posted on the Twitter master homepage (at least for a few seconds). There are tools you can use to watch every Tweet posted and send you an alert if certain keywords, for example, your or your company's name is used. It's a terrific way to not only detect the clients that are giving upbeat referrals, but to find out about gripes in time to address them.

This is a important basis for why I don't figure Twitter lends itself to a traditional ROI calculation. Can you really measure the dollar value of these types of client retention techniques? I've not yet met a client that tracked his conversions meticulously enough to reply "yes" to that question. In deference to Twitter's many and ofttimes well-thought-of doubters, there's likewise no way to show with any certainty that they succeed either.

Things turn even more murky when you consider client acquisition, but this is where I posit that Twitter has an opportunity to truly shine.

So what's the trick for getting new clients with Twitter? Again... there are numerous ways.

You can put links in your messages. This can be used to drive guests to your site, and (if the content you're linking to is important) there's an excellent chance a number of of your friends will "ReTweet" it, meaning they will forward it to their followers. If you have a blog this works terrifically, but you could always link to a free article on your site. For example... how about we link to an article called "How to Get Top Dollar for Your Home". There's a good chance that lots of of your friends are familiar with at least one individual who's selling a house. If so they could ReTweet it, and this tweet will be shared not just to the individual who's selling, but to ALL the ReTweeter's friends as well. Tweets can, and often do, "go viral"; and this can introduce your brand to a lot of new people.

The links in tweets also have a little search engine optimization (often called "SEO") advantage. I won't get too into this as I don't want to get distracted with technical minutiae. Concisely: tweet links don't pass any "Page Rank" but they do carry some small amount of "Domain Authority" and help the search engines in finding and indexing new pages.

Now I have made my living doing professional CPA Website Design for a lot of years, so what I'm about to say may give the impression of being self-defeating at first blush. It isn't though. I plan my sites with this marketing philosophy in mind. A serious CPA website is constructed to be a networking tool.

The smartest, savviest, most successful business owners don't, typically, pick their CPA randomly from Bing searches or the local phone book. The better prospects find their CPA by networking. They contact you because somebody they know and have faith in recommended you. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are a material online evolution of traditional network marketing, and as such, merit profound respect as marketing tools.