The beginner's guide to social media for accountants

Introduction

The PracticeWeb team was prompted to put together this guide by a few conversations I have had with clients about how effective they felt their social media marketing was.

A lot of accountants have told me they think it’s clear that interacting on social media can provide a great opportunity for them to generate leads and future customers.

Unfortunately, a lot of them are struggling to embrace this in practice, and they’re not sure how to measure return-on-investment for their social media activity.

Even if you know the benefits, social media marketing can be hard to get started with.

Striking the right tone, reaching the right audience and creating genuine engagement all take time and hard work – but with the right approach, they can be done.

At PracticeWeb, our view is that the more people know and understand about the art of marketing, the more likely they’ll be to get engaged and excited.

With that in mind, we’ve written this guide specifically for accountants and firm marketers who might not know the first thing about social media, but want to start building an online platform for their practice.

Declan Cox

Account Manager,

PracticeWeb

Understanding social media

Social media – websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

Social media has become a part of our common culture ever since the inception of SixDegrees, which was created in 1997.

For those who don’t remember, SixDegrees was a website that enabled users to upload a profile and make friends with other users, based on the idea that each person is just six, or fewer, social connections away from anyone else in the world.

That concept has been taken further than many could have imagined in the last couple of decades, with social media sites changing the way we connect and share information on a global scale.

Social media began to explode in popularity around the early 2000s, with networks like MySpace and LinkedIn gaining prominence, while sites like Photobucket and Flickr facilitated online photo sharing.

In 2005 we saw the birth of YouTube, creating an entirely new way for people to communicate and share with each other across great distances. Today, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet, after Google.

By 2006, Facebook and Twitter became available. These sites remain some of the most popular social networks on the internet. Other sites like Tumblr, Spotify, Foursquare, Pinterest and Instagram began popping up to fill specific social media niches.

Today, there is an eclectic mix of social media sites to suit both business and personal use, and the part they play in our day-to-day lives is impossible to ignore.

We can only speculate about what the future of social networking may look in the next decade, or even the next century, but it seems clear that it will exist in some form for as long as humans are alive.

As of 30 January 2020, the number of active social media users passed the 3.8 billion mark – an increase of more than 9%, or 321 million new users, since that time last year. To put that into context, that’s 49% of the world’s population.

What’s more, most of those people access social media via their mobile phones. Wherever they are, and whatever time of day it is, people are connected to a constant stream of social media, making it an incredibly valuable tool for any business to reach its audience.

 

How can social media help to grow your accountancy firm?

As powerful as it is, social media can be intimidating for people who aren’t  immersed in its culture.

Even if you have your own accounts for personal use, it can be hard to know how you can use it to build a platform for your accountancy business online.

Many are put off because they don’t know where to start, but the fact is, social media is just too important, and too valuable as a digital marketing tool, to ignore.

Being active on social media and providing useful content that’s relevant to your audience will pay dividends when it comes to growing your business.

The more content you create and post, the more followers you will gain which, in turn, will mean more traffic being directed towards your website. The more traffic you receive, the more leads you will make. It really is that simple.

We’ll be honest, though – it won’t happen overnight. It takes a well-planned, methodical approach and consistent posting across your platforms to start seeing results from your social media activities.

But with the right approach, you’ll be able to attract the kind of clients you want to work with, build your brand awareness, and create a loyal following among your existing customer base.

 

What’s inside our beginner’s guide?

• Understanding social media
• How can social media help to grow your business?
• Choosing a social media platform that’s right for your firm
• Creating a social media strategy
• Setting out a social media governance policy
• Scheduling content
• Best social media practices
• Measuring ROI from social media.

 

Establish your marketing strategy

Our marketing strategy workshops are designed to dig deep into the underlying goals, values and identity of your firm, and use those to create an actionable marketing plan.

We also provide content marketing strategy workshops, which help you develop engaging content that connects with your ideal clients.

Contact us today to talk about your digital marketing strategy.