Social Media for Accountants: 5 Top Tips to Save You Time

There’s no doubt that social media for accountants is essential to stay ahead in today’s online market. Many of your potential clients spend large portions of their day online, so missing the chance to be seen by them with relatively little work would be a wasted opportunity.

Getting it right is essential in order to reap the benefits that social media can bring. It’s the ‘getting it right’ that can take up much of one valuable resource – your time – something accountants rarely have. Don’t be put off, because it will pay off!

A vast pool of potential clients is available at your fingertips and is being tapped into by accountancy practices with great success. It’s also important to remember that social media platforms are ideal for nurturing current client relationships which come before future business.

Five Top Tips:

1) Choose the right platform(s): Survey your clients to find out which social media channels they use and avoid the rest. If you’re active on several channels, save precious time with social media management software which means you only need to log in and post once, and this is shared across the channels you specify.

2) Create visual content: This provides re-useable material to save you a load of time in the future. Businesses showing personality generate far more engagement, so posting from an individuals’ company profile always does better than from the company’s main profile. By providing a constant stream of diverse content updates and using varying visual media you will retain your high value followers. On average, someone needs to see a piece of online content seven times to remember it, so don’t worry about posting visuals more than once!

3) Network with influencers: Don’t spend time trawling through lists of local businesses who might need accountancy servicess, following them in the hope they might follow you back. To gain from social media long-term, spend time engaging with individuals or organisations who are likely to influence the decision making process of your potential clients. The key with networking is to be sociable. Done successfully, you following should increase and, crucially, these will be quality followers who can bring you business.

4) Set goals and measure them: Focus your time on what you know will engage by measuring the success of your posts to date. Just a few moments spent using a social media analytics tool tells you which of your content is most successful. It will tell you what time of day is best to post as well as what kind of content, so you only need to spend time doing what actually works.

5) Consistency. Consistency. Consistency: Would you appreciate it if someone dropped off your radar and then spammed you with forceful content? By maintaining a consistent and relevant presence you will gain faithful connections who trust you and your product/services. As mentioned previously, it’s ok to reuse content (in fact, you should!). The average lifetime of a tweet is less than 30 minutes, so don’t waste time trying to create too much content as it’s a drain on your resources. By scheduling your content using a social media management tool, you can remove the stress from trying to maintain consistency throughout your working week.

Get more social media best practices
For further guidance on how to use social media for growth, view our on-demand webinar with Alex Tucker from PracticeWEB and Lauren Coates from Thomson Reuters.