Let’s explore why your social media engagement is low, and what you can do to improve it for your firm.
As an accountant, when it comes to social media your primary focus may be on growing your LinkedIn following.
But in recent years we’ve seen some firms engaging their audiences on Facebook, Instagram, and some even on YouTube.
But it’s hard to grow a following of potential clients on social media, and even harder to demonstrate the financial benefits of engaging people on your social platforms.
The first rule of social media
Many accounting firms have forgotten one of the core reasons for social media’s existence. To be social!
It’s become an onslaught of article links, webinars, and image quotes. Clients want to see the people behind the brand. They want to learn more about your team.
What are you up to during the day?
Are you celebrating any birthdays in the office?
What about that team lunch you had on Friday down at the local?
Do you have any significant milestones you should be sharing?
A large percentage of consumers will feel more connected to a firm when there is a more social or conversational interaction online.
Don’t JUST post links and videos focussed on educating your audience on things like tax planning tips. Inject more posts focussed on showcasing the humans in your firm, pose questions, and polls, and become more conversational in your language on social media.
So, tip number 1, be more social.
Leverage micro-content
Accountants are sometimes telling us they have to go out there and make a ton of content for their social media accounts and they make a big ordeal of it.
It’s not as difficult as it seems to create a ton of content for your social media. You just need to work smarter, not harder.
Your micro-content comes from bite-sized pieces of information that are taken from one larger piece of content and shared across your social media pages driving traffic through to that main content piece.
As an example, if you’re doing a talk or a keynote, great, do the talk, have someone film it. Once your hands are on that video have someone chop it up into 2–3-minute clips, images, and text grabs and post all of these to your social media pages, with a link leading back to your main piece of content.
You can turn one piece of content, into several bite-sized pieces, or micro-content pieces that’ll help you get 3 or 5x more views than if you were to focus on just one large piece of content which could sometimes be a hit or miss.
But when you do 6 or 7 pieces of micro-content you can determine which ones work best for your audience. Which formats are they engaging with more? Is it images? Quotes? Short videos?
Only post content relevant to that specific platform
We’ve seen this happen day in and day out, where a firm will post the same content piece on their LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram not realising that audiences will interact with content differently on each platform.
What works on one platform won’t work on the other.
You need to ask yourself why your clients would be on Instagram at one point instead of on LinkedIn. It’s because they want a change of scenery.
A lot of firms will use images with quotes over the top of the image and whilst this may be effective on one platform it may not yield the results you need on the other.
Each algorithm on social media is not the same and they favour different content formats.
You need to find out which content format works best for each of your social media platforms and stop regurgitating the same post on each social platform.
If you’re getting traction with image quotes on Twitter but you’re not getting much traction at all on LinkedIn, stop doing them on LinkedIn and find another format that may work better for the algorithms of that platform and for your audience.
The best thing about your social media is that you can test what works.
Spend more time NOW finding out what works to save you wasted time LATER
If you spend more time now finding out what works best for your firm on social media to up your engagement, it’ll save you a lot of wasted time down the track on posts that simply aren’t generating the traction you need for your firm.
