How important is social media for Accountants?

 
Following the recent Brighton Chamber debate, Vicky King, Marketing Manager at Plus Accounting asks how important social media is in the accounting world.

A lot of firms are asking the question “Does social media really play a vital part in my businesses’ success?” The answer is debateable as you must understand that social media is not necessarily a sales tools but a means of brand awareness and profile raising.

Social media helps a business improve its reputation online and in the community, striking up conversations and getting involved in online discussions all helps improve the firm’s credibility. I recently attend a Brighton Chamber Debate event on Social Media and it proved to be fairly one sided, in that the majority of the audience believed that if you weren’t using social media you were missing a trick and eventually your business would suffer.

Social media is a vital component of a firm’s marketing plan, in itself it could be seen as a weak sales tool, but when supported by other promotional tools, such as direct marketing and personal selling they all work together to form a powerful strategy.

Social media can be used as little or as often as a firm wants, if you have a smaller budget it could be the main component of the marketing plan as it is free to use and you can offer your followers great value for money by tweeting tips, facts & offers on a daily basis, at Plus Accounting we market our Workshops and Surgeries via this method and have found it to be a very cost effective way of obtaining attendees. The other important tools, direct marketing and personal selling could then be used as a secondary tool due to the budget constraints.

At Plus Accounting we have a multitude of social media platforms but we do vary our audiences i.e. our Facebook page is primarily for our internal news and photos from social outings, whereas our LinkedIn profile produces continuous informative updates on deadlines, relevant topics & news items.

We are also beginning to use YouTube and believe that using this platform will provide us with a unique edge to many other firms, producing a video is completely alien to a lot of our staff but after some gentle persuasion & a few rehearsals the recording does not seem quite so bad! These bite size videos are perfect for our existing & prospective clients, they are easy to watch & great for our “on the go” busy lifestyles!

Take a look at our YouTube channel for our latest videos!
 

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk