Is Twitter Worth It?

Earlier this year, it seemed that all anyone talked about in the media was this great little tool called Twitter.  Predictably, I was very skeptical of what seemed to be “herd” mentality.  As a CPA, what good could this site do for my brand?  Could it bring me clients?  Could I connect better with my clients?  Colleagues at Symmetry Software seemed to think this was merely a fad and that it would pass with time.  So began my experiment.

What potential benefits are there?

• Recognition of financial expertise in an organized community
• Increased awareness of my brand, AskCPASam
• A chance to interact with other financial professionals
• A way to connect to people I would not normally find
• New way to discover trends in opinions towards the economy
• Through plug-ins, my website content is updated as often as I “tweet”

What I found was a place where spammers routinely “follow” me. The picture attached to the profile of these spammers is often explicit and very embarrassing if anyone decided to see who was following me.  This requires constant monitoring of this group to ensure that it stays professional.  Of course, this means even more work.

Many of my current clients who signed up for Twitter and followed me used the service for a couple weeks and then never came back.  I believe many of those accounts have been removed for inactivity.

While I have certainly connected with individuals outside my normal circles, they have been other financial professionals with whom I share ideas and opinions and new stories.  I post notices when there is a new blog topic and direct folks to my website.  Therein lies the biggest weakness of Twitter.  While it is a community of sorts, it is a community of small attention span.  I have but 140 characters to promote a message.  That message stays within the confines of that platform.  I want my clients, both current and prospective to come to my site and see articles that contain my complete thoughts on a subject.  This is simply not possible in the Twitter platform.

If I were to find a lead on a potential client, there is no good way to contact them and qualify whether or not the lead is legitimate.  This is the anonymous nature of Twitter.

Perhaps you can tell by now that I have become an “unfan”.  Through Facebook and LinkedIn, I can post the same information and reach an audience that I have built of friends and acquaintances who know me.  I can still have my blog articles summarized in posts on those platforms.  Twitter is simply too unprofessional and limiting at this point in its life for me to really see upside potential.  Perhaps future upgrades will help.

I invite your comments.  Perhaps this will be discussed again in the future from another perspective.  Who can tell what way the technology will go.