74% of buyers use social media when making a purchase decision. So how do you make sure your practice is visible to them? We asked our award-winning social media team for some tips on how to make your practice social media stand out.
A practice social media campaign involves using social media tools to accomplish a particular goal for your practice, such as acquiring new clients, raising awareness or increasing your number of followers.
The key difference that sets campaigns on social media apart is the ability to target your efforts and measure the results. That’s because detail matters. After all, with 6000 tweets published every second, you need to find some way to cut through.
Success in this area is actually not all about how you execute the campaign. Campaigns really live or die by their preparation, planning and evaluation, so here are three ways to make sure yours stands out from the crowd.
As mentioned above, before you get started you need to pick your goal. Many businesses using social media are only looking at growing their number of followers and fans. While this is useful for establishing your presence at the beginning, your long term goals need to go beyond getting your numbers up.
The key metric for building a stronger client relationship, and closing new clients, is engagement. This involves measuring metrics such as retweets and replies – actions that demonstrate a connection made with your audience.
If you’re looking to build your brand presence among your target audience, engagement can boost this by over 300%.
People respond best to a personal approach. To make the most of this, use your team. After all, your team represents your brand, so it’s key to have them involved in a social media campaign.
Once you’ve decided on a campaign objective, whether it’s engaging with a specific community group or your clients, be specific about how you expect your team to engage.
Do you want them to tweet a photo related to your campaign theme with a hashtag? Or do you want them to reach out and tag a client and start a conversation? Getting your team to engage not only expands your reach, but it adds that key personal touch to a campaign and puts a face, or faces, to your practice’s name.
Social media, especially Twitter, is a constant conversation. Just like a cocktail party, one of the best ways to stand out is by having interesting things to talk about. The great news is, social media actually makes it really easy to share interesting things that are happening in your space.
Social media studies have found that effective content requires three key elements.
As mentioned before, the key is matching your content and approach to your target audience. And at this stage, it is likely that your audience aren’t interested in your firm yet, so go for things that are relevant to them.
For example, if you are looking to engage small business owners in the construction sector, you can share advice on how to manage supplier invoices or how to keep track of expenses on the move. If you want to mention your firm, you could share a case study of one of your successful clients in this sector and how you made a difference to their business.
Consistency is also important as campaigns have a cumulative effect and you need to make sure your efforts are tied together. One of the easiest ways to do this is with a hashtag, as we did for our own practice-focused social media campaign.
We conducted a successful campaign to coincide with Global Bookkeeping Week. With our own content, as well as articles we found online, we pushed out throughout the week with #GlobalBookkeepingWeek. This shows that we’re not only focused on the engagement and advocacy side of things but providing useful content that is supporting the bookkeeping community, which happened to be the ICB’s theme for the campaign.
If there is a hashtag associated with the campaign, use it in every Tweet or every post you make. Be consistent and provide useful content that is supporting your campaign, whether it is for a bookkeeping community group or a niche of clients. Then you’ll be sure to get positive engagement and recognition from this.
Influencers are a common topic of conversation in social media. The term just means someone with standing within a community who you can use to help spread your message.
The reason they come up is because they work. 93% of marketing professionals report getting results in improving visibility through influencer engagement strategies.
Having a well-known community member involved in your practice social media campaign will increase the reach and engagement of your campaign. It could be a member of a trade association, a prominent member of the community or even just someone involved with existing community groups on Facebook or LinkedIn.
The input required from them is minimal, so don’t be afraid to ask. One post, or even a comment on a post, on Facebook or a LinkedIn group regarding your campaign lends you credibility and authority.
The more people you have supporting your messages and talking about the campaign to all their fans and followers, the better.
These steps might seem like they’re complicating the campaign, but it’s important to remember that the best campaigns are simple, authentic and engaging.
It’s easy to get caught up in social media, which has more than 2.3 billion users worldwide – but the “why” of your campaign will always be the core. All the points above must be in the service of that point. The value you provide is what you’re really promoting, and that’s what will capture your audience’s imagination.