Using Twitter to Grow Your Business

May 20, 2009

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Agenda

• What is Twitter?• How can it help my business?• Getting started• Success stories• Useful tools• Q&A/Discussion

What is Twitter?

• A “micro-blogging” service where users can post public messages (both personal or professional)–Must be 140 characters or less

• Has become a new way to communicate & build relationships

• Growth has quadrupled in the last 2 months to 17 million visitors (April 2009)

Twitter’s growth

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What are the main benefits?

• Grow Your Reputation– Publicize your resources (online and offline)

• Find New Clients– Help people with accounting issues

• Network with Peers– 120 QuickBooks experts on Twitter today (and growing)

Remember…it’s a tool for building relationshipsRemember…it’s a tool for building relationships

Some common terms

• Tweet– A post made on Twitter

• ReTweet– Reposting someone else’s Tweet on your account – Shown as “RT @_____”

• @replies– A message to another user (eg, @IntuitPayroll: Hey, how are you?)

• Followers– When you follow other people, you see their tweets and vice versa– Your follower list is public

• Hashtag– A tag used for a specific topic to make it easily searchable by users– Create a hashtag by prefixing a word with a “#” symbol (eg, #CPA)

Demo 1: Twitter overview

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Getting started

• Create an account– Setup takes 1 minute– Fill out profiles with your bio, website and picture

• Read what your colleagues are saying – Use Twitter’s search function to search for key terms• Eg, “QuickBooks”• Save those searches

• Begin a dialogue!

Provide useful links whenever possibleProvide useful links whenever possible

What can I tweet about?

• Repurpose your existing online content (website, videos)• Promote your speaking engagements & trainings• ReTweet beneficial and relevant news to your followers• Provide helpful tips using the “#QBtip” hashtag• Help users with their questions• Send Thank You’s to people who mention or ReTweet you

Give first and you shall receiveGive first and you shall receive

Some examples

Demo 2: Example tweets

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Best practice: Dante Layton

• Uses Twitter seamlessly– Twitter, website, webinars, video content

all reinforce each other

• Engages and helps users• Drives leads: Staples/Free QB

promotion– Promoted free webinar on Twitter–Over 50 sign-ups – Earned over $6,000 with follow up

consulting– Invested 5 hours marketing including

webinar time

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/dantelayton • Website: www.dantelayton.com

How to “follow” effectively

Whom to follow• Your referral network:– Current clients– Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, other local orgs– Bankers, attorneys, family, friends– Publications, associations, etc.

How to find them (and how they can find you)• Twitter Search conversations• Directories: www.Twellow.com and www.WeFollow.com• Your friends’ followers

Engage users to achieve both quantity AND qualityEngage users to achieve both quantity AND quality

Other helpful tools

• Bit.ly: http://bit.ly/ – Shortens long URLs and tracks your links

• TweetDeck: www.tweetdeck.com – Personal dashboard for Twitter

• HelloTxt: http://hellotxt.com/– Allows you to publish updates from multiple social networks

• Twitalyzer: www.twitalyzer.com–Measures impact, sentiment and influence on Twitter

• …and hundreds more

Demo 3: Twitter tools

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Q&A/Discussion

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Contact info

• Chris Kim– Email: chris_kim@Intuit.com– Twitter: http://twitter.com/IntuitPayroll – Blog: www.IntuitPayrollBlog.com

• TWN Yahoo Group– http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/iasb/