With that said, you can use Twitter to be exposed to new ideas, be more valuable to clients and attract new business. If you want to get new clients with Twitter or serve your current clients better, you'll need to know exactly who your target audience is and then tweet daily about the issues they care about. If you're always relaying to them the information they need to succeed, Twitter is likely to generate business for you.
One of the main ways a financial advisor can enhance his or her relationships is by offering information their clients can't get anywhere else. Professors are too busy teaching to do their own financial planning. Entrepreneurs are also too busy to cruise the information highway in search of the right route to success. You can gain the respect and trust of those professionals by tweeting about specific financial issues they need to know. Eventually, some will give you business.
Getting Started
Getting starting on Twitter takes only seconds. Simply go to Twitter.com and click "Get Started."
If you use Gmail, AOL or a few other popular portals, you will be able to find out which friends on those services are also already using Twitter. The site then suggests some famous people you might want to meet. No need to bother with that now, however.
The first thing to do-even before you try to locate your friends or prospects-is set up your Twitter home screen. Click on "Settings" to set up your time zone and other important information, including your firm's Web site URL and your bio. This information is important. Be sure your brief bio contains keywords that describe your business focus. If your target clients are "chiropractors" or "executives at Florida Power & Light," then use those phrases and words in your bio.
After that, click on the submenu in the setting for "picture" to upload your photo. Choose a picture with a close-up of just your face that shows you smiling. If you need to crop your photo or do other editing, there's an easy, free picture editor at www.drpic.com.
Next, spruce up your Twitter page by clicking on "design" and selecting a background graphic. If you want to get fancy, a bevy of sites allow you to customize your background. For instance, you can create backgrounds at www.twitterbacks.com/ or www.mytweetspace.com.
Finding Followers
To generate business on Twitter you want to target hundreds or even thousands of people in your niches. Start with people you know. Again, your contacts in Gmail, AOL and Yahoo! can be exported into Twitter so you can look up their Twitter screen names. However, most advisors use Outlook, Act! or some other customer relationship management software, and these people will have to take an extra step or two to export e-mail addresses to Twitter. One option is to export your contact list to an Excel file and upload it to a Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo! account. Alternatively, you can simply cut and paste a comma-separated list of e-mail addresses into Twitter-just click on the "Find People" tab to get started.
You can also post your Twitter ID on your blog, like I did (gluck.advisorblogcentral.com), and place this ID at the bottom of all e-mails in your "signature." This makes it easy for people to follow you.
To find prospects, use some of the many new Twitter-related applications that have cropped up in recent months. Because Twitter has published an easy-to-use application programming interface (API), free applications have sprouted up faster than they can be tracked. The best list of Twitter applications I've come across is at www.squidoo.com/twitterapps.