Social Media - Going beyond the expected!

Vicky King, Marketing Manager at Plus Accounting talks about how she uses Social Media to promote events.

Here at Plus Accounting, our Social Media activity has increased dramatically over the past 18 months. We have gone from having a very minimal presence to using it on a daily basis. As a firm we decided to use Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube as professional accounts and Facebook as an internal company page, where we can upload photos from social events and keep staff updated etc.

As we have become more involved with these platforms we have understood the potential of each one and how they can increase the firm’s profile and voice key messages.

2014 has proved to be a year of change for the firm, moving away from the traditional and trying to become an innovative and forward thinking accountancy firm; trying to go beyond the expected.

In 2014 we entered the world of video and albeit DIY, these bite-size videos have proved to be a great success. Every other month we choose a topic of interest and produce an internal video/presentation which is then posted on to the website. Clients and prospective clients value this easy to access information and statistics show that as consumers we are steering towards the visual transfer of knowledge rather than words.

Moving on from this, we developed a Workshop programme for 2014 and our first Workshop took place at the end of January, “Raising Finance through Crowd Funding & Banks”. We have had a fur-ther three Workshops and these have been titled, “What can EIS and SEIS do for your business?” , “Thinking inside the Box – Maximise your Assets” and “What Women What”. We have the remaining two Workshops already confirmed and really want to continue this programme into 2015.

We wanted to reach a new audience with these Workshops and felt that the central Brighton location and free price tag would encourage this. The topics have been carefully chosen and when working with our collaborators we have ensured that both parties are comfortable that the topic was one of interest to the local business community.

The audience is mainly reached through social media and we market these events via each platform on a regular basis and because of our increased profile our followers are always helping share the updates and spread the message. This form of advertising has generated some positive turnouts and our drop-out rate is roughly 10%, which is pretty good!

However, there are some drawbacks to this type of event advertising, it can be seen as spam to some followers and when posting in Groups on LinkedIn it is difficult to know whether the owner will see the post as spam or a relevant promotion. I do try to be selective with the Groups I am posting in as I am fully aware of the flip side of receiving information that is not relevant. However I do feel that these Workshops are relevant to the majority of the business community and the knowledge that can be taken from them is invaluable to some of the delegates.

The Workshops are a great chance to spread the Plus Accounting message and meet new local businesses and professional contacts that would have been difficult to meet any other way. Therefore using LinkedIn and other platforms to market these events will continue and I hope to see you at a Workshop soon!

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