Having a strong strategy isn’t optional for accounting firms that wish to succeed on social media. After your firm sets its goals, it’s time to come up with a killer strategy for how you’ll use social media to help reach those goals.
Before I go any further, I feel the need to clarify. Unless your firm has a specific employee or team dedicated to running its social media, you probably have other things to do with your time than creating a social media strategy. So, to be clear, this doesn’t take a lot of time and is more or less a “grow while you go” sort of thing. Think of it as an outline—something to help guide your firm’s social media presence.
What Is a Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is an outline of social media’s role in helping your firm achieve its goals. In this blog I’ll give you a three-step approach to help you define your strategy.
Step 1: Know Your Goals
In order to have a strong social media strategy, you must know what your firm’s goals are. Your firm likely has more than one goal for this year. Part of strategizing is knowing how to make each goal work together.
One example of a goal would be to increase revenue from advisory services by X amount of dollars by the end of 2023.
Step 2: Develop Content
You’ll need content to post to social media to help you achieve the goals you’ve set. There are many types of content that you can share. Articles from other sources, your firm’s blog posts, videos, podcasts, thought leadership pieces, webinars, e-books, case studies and whitepapers are all good options.
Content from other trusted sources is constantly readily available and can be used often to back up your claims or when you don’t have much internal content to share. Webinars and e-books are longer-form content that take longer to create, so you likely don’t have a plethora of them to share. Share longer-form content occasionally and break it down into smaller pieces of content to keep the momentum going.
Know the content you have on hand that you can start with, encourage the creation of longer-form content and always be on the lookout for external sources to support your claims.
Continuing with the goal of increasing revenue from advisory services, there’s a plethora of articles on this topic that can be used. Your firm may also already have blog posts or information about the advisory services it offers on its website that you can use. Ask clients your firm provides advisory services for to give testimonials that can be used on social media. If your firm has hosted a webinar on advisory services, take snippets from that to use on socials. Take longer-form content and break it down into bite-sized content for social media. Repurposing will be king when you’re a small marketing team (or even a team of one).
Step 3: Strategize
Now that you know what content you already have and what you’ll need to create, you can brainstorm how you’ll use it to achieve your firms’ goals. How you use that content to reach your firm’s goals is your social media strategy.
Back to our advisory services example, with the goal and content in mind, there are multiple strategies you could implement:
- Educate your firm’s current clients about the additional advisory services you could be offering them
- Target a different audience to take on new advisory clients
- Build trust and credibility around your firm’s advisory services
All of these are strategies that, depending on your firm’s specific needs, can be applied to achieve the goal of increasing revenue from advisory services.
Finals Thoughts
Now is the perfect time to outline a social media strategy for your firm based on its 2023 goals. Social media can play a large role in achieving your firms’ goals as long as you know how to use what you have on hand, repurpose long-form content, create along the way and always tie social media strategy back to your goals.
Having a strategy will keep your social media posts consistent and on brand, which is sure to drive results and move your firm closer to achieving its goals.
