People often express surprise that Twitter is a tool that we find valuable in our business - most small businesses we speak to seem to think it's a waste of time. I think that the key is that we know exactly what we use Twitter for:
- Listening to people - it's interesting what's on the minds of clients, contacts and others. Often people are concerned about things that it wouldn't have occured to me as something on their radar. Sometimes they're unconcerned about things that I thought would be important to them.
- Making it easy for our clients and contacts to direct their contacts to us if they want to. A large part of our client base are big Twitter users. If one of their friends or contacts ask "Does anyone know a good accountant?" then it's really useful for us to have a presence on Twitter that's at least somewhat credible, so our client can signpost us to them. We're not trying to use Twitter to find new clients that are completely unknown to us, just to make it easier for "friends of friends" to find us and engage with us.
Note that the number of followers we have does not feature in either of those purposes in any respect - it's of no interest to us.
I'm not saying that we're using Twitter as best we could, and I'm not saying that we're using it the only way a professional services firm should. But we have thought about what we use it for, and it works for us. Many businesses we speak to, when put on the spot, don't actually know why they're doing it.
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