5 ways your firm can tweet its way to referral success

Posted by efficiencycoach on Sun, 01/07/2012 - 18:58 in Blogs 763 1 comment | report

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question? With apologies to Shakespeare, that is the question, which many accountants and lawyers are pondering. Is Twitter a waste of time or a serious business marketing tool? In my opinion, and the managing partner’s opinion, whom I was lunching with yesterday, the answer is well and truly yes. As my companion put it, her fellow partners tended to be less scathing and far more interested in using twitter after she won a £100k piece of business using it. That’s a sizeable piece of business for any firm…

So, what are the secrets to winning referrals via twitter:

1. Use it as a keeping in touch tool

Twitter is a great networking tool, and makes it easy to keep in regular contact with your network – without seeming too forward or pushy. Use the list functionality within twitter to group together your prospects, members of the networks your firm participates in, introducers and current clients. Then discipline yourself to check the tweets on this list, and have a chat with people on the list every day.

2. Integrate twitter into your every day business routine

Cast your mind back 25 years, when email was starting to become a business tool. If you can remember that far back, I bet you were wondering how you would fit checking and writing emails into your daily working routine. Now, you just do it… right? Well, it’s the same with Twitter, make checking and tweeting part of your every day routine. So, when you check your emails, check your tweets.

3. Know why you (and others in your firm) are on twitter

Using Twitter in a vacuum is just the same as going to a face-to-face networking event and wondering why you bothered to turn up in the first place. Before you embrace the full delights of twitter, take some time to consider the answers to the following questions:

Who do you want to meet and communicate with on twitter?
How will this help you generate and convert more of your leads?
What type of content will you regularly share to help attract the right kind of followers to you?

4. Treat twitter as an extension of your face-to-face networking activities

The same etiquette, which you would use for face-to-face networking, exists on line. Spend the time to get to know people before you suggest a phone call to get to know them better. Don’t be tempted to ‘sell’ your services via twitter.

5. Engage with other people on Twitter

You can delegate tweeting your content, e.g. links to articles or your blog, tips – but for maximum impact you can’t delegate or schedule the engagement with your followers. I.e. the conversations you have with them. So, take a deep breathe and take the initiative and find people to follow and talk too.

What success has your firm had with using Twitter to generate referrals?

Comments

How to tweet

ellenjenkins | Wed, 04/07/2012 - 12:06 | Permalink

Hi - I am finding twitter a minefield as there are so many tweets out there. Do people actually read them and is it really a way to get to know your potential clients? There are so many tweets coming through on an hourly basis how can your tweet be seen amongst all of these?!

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The Joined Up Networker

I help professionals and firms become the Go-To-Expert. Unusually for someone with an Engineering Degree, I accidentally became a writer and used my knowledge on social media to write the current best-selling and award-winning book on networking, The FT Guide To Business Networking. (75 five star reviews on Amazon - and read the 1st chapter for free here) People frequently talk about me as someone who really knows her stuff – which may be the reason I have, over the last decade, worked with over 300 partners, coached and trained over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices. After nearly 5 years for working for BDO LLP, I realised I loved the intellectual challenge of working with accountants, so made working with accountants (and lawyers as I am a glutton for punishment) my sector specialism.

I was honoured to be a judge at the British Accountancy Awards in 2011 and 2012, plus I am a member of the Accountant's Club Global Advisory Panel.

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The Excedia Group was founded by myself and Jon Baker to bring clarity, perspective and knowledge to help our clients achieve their business goals. Over 75% of our work comes from professional service firms - both large and small, helping them get more clients via referrals utilising networking and social media. Over 30% of the Excedia group’s clients are small professional practices of between 1-50 employees.

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