Twitter's marketing value is being hotly argued right now. Will the ROI justify the time spent on Twitter? Many number crunchers say "no". Twitter also has a lot of converts, though. A lot of marketers are heralding it as the next great trend in marketing. I stand solidly with the marketers who see potential in social marketing, but when all is said and done you'll have to choose for yourself where you stand.

Of course a lot of us might be asking what the heck Twitter is in the first place.

Twitter is a social networking site that enables it's members to send cursory notes to their friends called "Tweets". Do not confuse this with Email. When you send a "Tweet" you don't specify a recipient. Instead they are broadcast publicly for the world see. Your friends, or "followers", each have their own homepage, however, and your message will be added to it so they can view it the next time they log in.

How does this translate to more billable hours? There are actually more than a few techniques you can benefit from. Client retention is a good place to kickoff.

Many of your clients already use Twitter, and that in itself is a solid reason to use it yourself. They will like that you're showing a concern in their lives by following them and that you've spent the time to join a community that has significance to them.

Getting your brand in front of clients is also easy on Twitter. You can use your tweets to show them how hard you are working for them in a way that feels personal to them. Another advantage is that by monitoring your clients' tweets you will learn things about them that you might not otherwise be privy to, and be able to contact them more intimately when appropriate. I'm not just talking about catching a client tweeting about accounting problems that you can help them or their friends with. That may happen, but not very regularly. I'm talking about their lives. As an accountant you are frequently not privy to events like births, marriages, graduations, and deaths in time to send out suitable congratulations or condolences. Twitter will put you in the loop.

Is there anybody who would argue that simple personal contact isn't fantastic for client retention?

Finally, all tweets are public. Not only do they appear on all your followers Twitter welcome pages, they are also posted to the site's index page (at least for a second or two) there are tools you can use that will allow you to keep watch over this stream of information and email you if anyone sends out a tweet about, for example, your company. It's a great way to not only identify the clients that are providing confirming referrals, but to overhear complaints in time to deal with them.

This is a chief basis for questioning the number-crunching Twitter naysayers. I don't accept that it's actually workable to calculate the dollar value of these kinds of customer retention techniques. In the defense of Twitter's numerous and frequently respected doubters, there's also no way to prove with any certainty that they succeed either.

When considering client acquisition things turn even more nebulous, but this is where I offer Twitter has the chance to really shine.

So what's the trick for finding new clients with Twitter? Again... there are lots of ways.

Twitter lets you to place backlinks in your posts. This can be used to drive visits to your website, and (if the material you're linking to is notable) there's a fair chance a few of your friends will "ReTweet" it, meaning they will forward it to their friends. If you have a blog this works wonderfully, but you can link to a free article on your website. For example... suppose we link to a report called "How to Get Top Dollar for Your Home". There's a good chance that a lot of of your followers know at least one individual who's selling a house. If so they may ReTweet it, and this tweet will be broadcast not just to the home owner who's selling, but to ALL the ReTweeter's friends also. It will reveal your brand to a lot of people if even a few of your tweets go "viral" like this.

There is a little bit of search engine optimization (often called "SEO") value to tweeted links, also. I won't get overly into this because I don't want to get knocked off track with technical nitty-gritty. Briefly: tweet backlinks don't extend any "Page Rank" but they do extend a little bit of "Domain Authority" and aid the search engines in discovering and indexing new pages.

Now I have made a good living doing professional CPA Website Design for more than ten years, so what I'm about to express may come across as self-defeating at first. It isn't however. I purpose my websites with this marketing doctrine in mind. A well considered CPA website is designed to be a networking tool.

The most clever, most informed, most successful business owners don't, usually, pick their CPA or accountant arbitrarily from Google searches or the phone book. The best prospects choose their CPA by networking. They reach out to you because someone they know and have faith in suggested you. Using the identical logic sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are a material online evolution of traditional network marketing, and as such deserve great regard as marketing tools.