Remove that Twitter badge from your website – Now!

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?

Semi-related post: Four Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Twitter.