Using Social Media to Market Your Accounting Practice

Social Media Marketing For Accountants

Social Lets You Directly Interact with Your Audience 

Social in this sense will cover both social push and social pull. Social push is generally in the form of paid advertising on a social platform to a target audience. Social pull is shareable content published mainly to your social network which is seen as valuable enough from them to share to their networks and pulls interested parties to your site to learn more.

Push contest consists of advertising, content marketing – promoting a blog post, infographic, etc. (boosting), blog posting (curated and original). Pull consists of shareable quality, original work, which is compelling enough for the reader to want to share.

The mix between push and pull depends on the industry, location, and target audience. 

Social media for accountants can be tricky. It’s a fine line to walk between educating and interacting and providing what the end user would perceive as financial advice.

Push and other materials where you have direct editorial control (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) are best. You can disclaim that it does not provide financial advice but rather educates others to stimulate interest in your services.

This can be a productive means to boost your credibility as an expert. As an attorney, you probably don’t need to be told, however, just to reiterate its importance, what is said in social media is public record. 

Stick to education and refrain from what could be considered advice and social media can help, especially when it comes to explaining what an accountant does and how that might help them.

Selecting Your Best Social Platforms

Above are the Big 5 social platforms as of today. They are likely to stay the top 5 for the foreseeable future. But, with many of the issues arising from the 2020 election, they may change in character.

Facebook

  • 2.5 Billion Users
  • 1.6 Billion Active Daily
  • 83% of Women & 75% of Men use Facebook.
  • Around seven-in-ten U.S. adults (69%) use Facebook.

LinkedIn

  • 90 million senior-level influencers
  •  63 million are decision makers.
  • There are 17 million opinion leaders
  • 10 million C-Level executives

Twitter

  • ½ Billion tweets/day.
  • 80% mobile
  • 25% of users are active daily
  • 80% of users live outside of the US

YouTube

  • 2 Billion monthly users
  • 30 Million daily users
  • 1% pay for a subscription
  • 40 Min/day
  • 50 M content developers

Instagram

  • 1 Billion monthly users
  • ½ use it daily
  • 500M stories daily
  • 25 M businesses
  • 37% US population

Listening to Hear Where You Target Is

Social listening and sentiment analysis are two tools which can help you determine where your customers are and with what they are engaging. These tools continue to evolve. New formats are launched, while older platforms exit. The industry is in a constant state of change. 

Follow the data not the stereotypes. It is easy but lazy to lump these groups into clearly defined buckets, but the truth is that your target is likely using multiple platforms at once.

This is where a persona is very useful. If you do not have one, we suggest completing Marketing Strategy for Accountants section first.

Push vs. Pull

Both methods involve the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

The key difference is in the interaction. Push is predominantly a one-way conversation. People don’t typically interact with one-way communication for long. Pull marketing is more like having a dialog or a conversation.  

Generates Leads

Both can generate up to 3X more leads than paid search and costs 62% less than traditional marketing. This is not surprising as its focus is on solving the problems your audience is actively seeking solutions and the ‘get to know you’. People are reluctant to do business with people they do not know or do not trust.

Focused on Audience Connections

It can help keep you current and relevant. It is labor intensive, but it does help provide the fuel to feed social marketing. If done well, users will keep coming back to see more. But, once done, it must be maintained. If you fail to maintain it, interest will fall quickly.

Changing Attitudes

It can help set you up as a thought leader in your industry so you are seen as a source of reliable information and authority. While it doesn’t directly impact SEO, by increase your following, you are more likely to generate links to your site, thereby increasing your page and domain authority

Choosing the Right Platform Mix

Choosing the right mix of platforms is highly dependent on industry, audience, and location.

For the legal industry, the social media platform of choice is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a good platform to increase your social media presence when prospecting for clients.

It provides a social media channel, where you can position yourself as an expert to your prospective clients.

The power of social media allows you to start conversations with potential clients where you increasingly engage with them by providing them with valuable information via post content or other types of content

Summary

Social lets you directly interact with your audience. Social push is generally in the form of paid advertising on a social platform to a target audience. Social pull is shareable content published mainly to your social network which they value enough to share.

The Big 5 social platforms as of today are likely to stay the top 5 for the foreseeable future. But, with many of the issues arising from the 2020 election, they may change in character.

Social listening and sentiment analysis are two tools which can help you determine where your customers are and with what they are engaging. Follow the data not stereotypes of who uses what.

The key difference between push and pull is in the interaction. Push is predominantly a one-way conversation. People don’t typically interact with one-way communication for long. Pull is more a dialog.

Digital Marketing for Accountants provides a holistic overview of all the digital media marketing mix.