Remove that Twitter badge from your website – Now!

September 20, 2010 / Duane / 18 Comments

I got asked last week why we don’t have a Twitter badge on our website. I think the asker assumed it was an oversight.

It isn’t.

As I’ve written before, the purpose of the KashFlow website is to get potential customers to register to take a no-obligation, 60-day free trial of our accounting software.

So anything that distracts from this end goal, or doesn’t move a website visitor towards it, is a Bad Thing.

Put another way, the website is a funnel, with the bottom of that funnel being the free-trial sign-up page.

Putting a badge on the website saying “Follow us on Twitter” would effectively be like getting a drill and putting a big hole in the side of the funnel for visitors to escape and maybe never return.

My turn to make some assumptions. I assume s/he is talking about Twitter being a method of getting people to your site to buy your wares.

Yes, it is – but why take someone from being on your site to another location in the hope of getting them back to your site???

That argument has some merit. We do have a good community around KashFlow, and following us on Twitter is a way to be a part of that – which is why we have a Twitter badge on our log out page.

But getting new trialists is a higher priority than getting new followers. Or to put it another way:

So do you have a Twitter badge on your site? Are you losing sales because of it?

About Duane Jackson

From childrens' homes to prison to business. Founded one of the first B2B SaaS companies, which he sold at the end of 2013. Read more here.

On Amazon: Four Thousand Days - My Journey from Prison to Business Success

Categories: Marketing, Social Media

Tags: followers, Twitter

http://john.onolan.org JohnONolan

Context is king.

Should you have a twitter button next to your signup button? No.
Should you have a twitter button in your footer / on your blog / in a place of relevance to community and customer service? Absolutely.

All things in moderation
s/he

Great blog Duane.

Twitter is most certainly a powerful tool, as we’ve seen when things go good or bad for brands it spreads like wildfire on the net and particularly on Twitter because people are so well connected and can get their message/complaint out quickly. Brands who aren’t watching Twitter and who do not embrace it as a way in which to encourage healthy and transparent conversations with their customers have fallen foul of the dark side of SM.

I don’t see Twitter as a way of driving people to your site to buy your wares, I see it more as a vehicle for conversation with customers, colleagues, rivals and your industry. Having a Twitter button on our homepages to us means that people can follow our content and conversations; it’s not about us simply pimping our wares (although this is of course how some people use it and to great effect).
http://www.anglotopia.net jonathanwthomas

Excellent point and I agree with you. It depends on how you use Twitter. On Anglotopia – my goal is to increase readership and reader engagement, so there are several ways for people to get to our Twitter page, Facebook, E-mail signup, etc from the site. It may annoy our advertisers, but regular readers make better ad clickers in the long run.

I should add that we don’t really acquire new readers from Twitter, it’s where people go after they’ve discovered us. Our Facebook fanpage is a better source of new readers for us – mostly because you can buy them with Facebook ads.
http://www.mattchedit.com/Blog.aspx Matt Chatterley

Ours sits firmly on our contact page – and is staying there, alongside various other methods of contact/communication/engagement. Why?

Because it belongs there and it suits the purpose of the page – if twitter is *your* path of least resistance to communicate with (or continue awareness of) us – then fab.

This is in start contrast to – for example – a page dedicated to making a sale, as you say. In which case, I’d probably still include twitter, but not until after the sale has been won or lost!
Tim

Interesting perspective, however I tend to think it indicates that you may have an over-simplified view of complex buyer behaviour. The reality is that people who are in the upper bounds of your funnel but are not ready to buy “right now” may look for a means of engagement with your brand that doesn’t involve signing up for a newsletter. They can then begin, through your twitter feed, to understand your brand values a little more and gain an emotional affinity with your brand (all of the things that help to encourage a buying decision).

Twitter in this identified context allows potential customers to put a little bit of your brand in their pocket to live with it and see how it feels. The marketing challenge, of course, is to ensure that your company feed meets the needs of this demographic (amongst many other demographics who also sit in that pool of “followers”).

The other thing you’re neglecting, of course, is that acquiring followers in this way is an incredibly cheap way of acquiring very highly targeted marketing data.

Lose, lose -potentially.

I can see your point about “drilling holes in your funnel” (love the expression btw) but right now they’re anonymously jumping out of the top. If you accept that they will leave, at least give them a free company t-shirt on the way out, know what I mean?

In summary, do you want your twitter logo in the top right hand corner of every page of your site, no. But is there a clear case for it’s inclusion somewhere, I think so.

If the customer can’t easily take away a tiny chunk of your brand, they might bounce and never return.
- http://www.onemanbandbookkeeping.co.uk Rosie Slosek
  
  I’ve done exactly that, Tim. Seen something about a brand I like, gone to webpage, and there is no way of keeping in contact. I wash hands at that point. I don’t like newsletters and a bookmark gives no context and gets lost in amongst the 10k other bookmarks.
  
  The other one is when there is a contact point (on Contact Page or bottom of Home Page for example) but I’m blocked. I need an email address for LI connection request or a TrueTwit validation. Don’t invite me and then block, rather than whether a person uses those tools.
Julian

You’ve got a very valid point Duane. If a Twitter button or anything else doesn’t get you business (or, as you nicely put it anythingOnYourSite != signUp) then get rid.

But I think Tim is right. There is more to it, especially when the followers are not your clients (yet). Of course you don’t put a button right next to your sign up button, but if you are using Twitter (as you are excellently) then it becomes a multi-faceted tool to generate the community feeling / engagement / affinity you’ve worked so hard for.
http://www.lingscars.com Ling Valentine

IMHO, Tim has it correct.

Dwayne is micro analysing everyone’s visit, squeezing the pips.

Hopefully, these are reasonably intelligent human visitors who are being discussed, so allow them a little bit of intelligence to wander around and choose what they want.

Is everything REALLY about the absolute maximising of sales? Does it REALLY matter if someone reads your social media for a couple of weeks before ordering the product? If it’s good enough to BUY NOW, it’s even better if it’s good enough to wait for a few weeks, surely?

I understand I move bigger ticket items than (very well priced and very good) software like KashFlow, online, but I’m not sure that real people feel any different about the “buying” click. It is a warm experience, hopefully. I am not sure I am keeping my neck in front of Dwayne in terms of profitability, I am not privvy to his accounts… last time we looked I was marginally ahead… and maybe he will overtake me (or has done) and prove me wrong, but for now I say don’t micro analyse the process so much and cut the website visitors some slack.

Instead, play with them more, give them more interaction and cuddle them.

Ling
http://www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk TJ

I would never put a twitter button on to take visitors away to my twitter page, but I do use the tweet button (which opens up a small window) so people can add my content to their twitter accounts.

The best of both worlds, people spread your content about, and you have that nice, trendy, must have twitter button on your site.

On a side issue, I recently bloged about how webmasters have become complacent about all these 3rd part scripts (buttons) just the other day.
Some BT users had a problem accessing Google one day last week, that wasn’t so much a problem, but because I used the google buzz button on some sites it meant my pages were not loading properly.

It got me thinking, I have at least 5 or 6 external services (mainly social networking/sharng buttons) running on some pages, if it means my pages won’t load properly if just one of these services crashes, maybe it is time to reconsider using any of them?
http://www.KashFlow.co.uk Duane Jackson

Thanks for all the comments.

If you could grab the user at the moment you know they’re not going to sign up and instead leave the site, then great – a twitter follower, whilst not as good as a new trialist, is better than nothing.

But it’s not possible to do that without horribly intrusive pop-ups and javascript.

You have managed to change my views a little though and we’ll soon be putting a Twitter badge on our contact page.
http://may.be/ Cliff Stanford

Interesting concept. But I don’t buy it. Currently from your home page I can click through to and follow six Twitter users. But not you.

How is it better to drill six irrelevant holes in your funnel than one highly relevant one?

Cliff.
http://www.davisonconsultancy.co.uk Robert

Good point, a call to action is highly recommended to ‘guide’ the reader into making the appropriate response. However, consider making the Twitter (and other distractions) open a new Window, thereby being convenient, yet still making your CTA viable.

PS. May I wish you well as any company taking on Sage et al in the SME Accounting space gets my vote!
http://www.KashFlow.co.uk Duane Jackson

@Cliff – I’m surprised no one else mentioned the presence of other links.

The big difference is they’re not a “Call to action”link- they don’t scream out “Click on me!!” like a Twitter “Follow me” button does.

However, they are little holes in the funnel, but the benefit of having them (adding credibility to the testimonials) makes them worth having.
http://www.simplyclicks.com David Burdon

Duane,

agree 100%. Keep it simple. Get new visitors down the buying funnel. I’d say the same about Facebook as well.
I look after a number of sites an can see very little converting traffic coming from social media sources.
When the effective cost of a visitor may well be several £s why distract them from paying you back.
tweetsbyskeet

Duane,

It’s simple. Agreed.

What difference does it make what you are saying on Twitter. Website audience and Twitter audience are two different groups.

Glad to hear a sensible comment.
- http://www.onemanbandbookkeeping.co.uk Rosie Slosek
  
  Are they? Twitter sends people to your site and your site can send people to Twitter. That’s the point. It works differently for different people and maybe you use Twitter for networking only and your website for sales only, but it isn’t like that for a lot of us.
http://Www.perfectpie.co.uk Brays Cottage

Still got the Twitter button on our site and still sell loads of pies through Twitter. And sometimes we sell KashFlow for you there too 😉
http://twitter.com/jamesslock James Seymour-Lock

Having the twitter button or a button for twitter is pretty vital for any business.

Having a twitter button in a highly visible place on a conversions page or other top level pages to drive traffic to your conversion pages isn’t a good idea though.

Most people know to look at the footer for the twitter account, and personally I will ALWAYS view a companies twitter before signing up with them, if the company is slow or inactive on twitter or people are saying bad things that reflects my decision on converting greatly.

UKStartups

Remove that Twitter badge from your website – Now!

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