If you are providing professional services, you must know that your business’ online presence is as significant as its physical presence.
Why is it so?
People choose to engage in a business with people rather than with other businesses. This means you must humanize your business or brand as much as possible. Social media gives you the platform to precisely do that – refine your business by interacting and engaging with your target audience.
Social media is a continually growing feature of digital marketing, which offers professional services firms the opportunity to reach and engage with potential and current clients. Professional services firms heavily depend on reputation and relationships. Long-term relations with clients are built on credibility, integrity, and intellectual leadership – attributes that can be displayed through social media.
Professional services firms can implement social media tactics to achieve the following objectives:
If you have enough following, you can use social media as a public relations management tool to engage or interact with the public and target markets.
Place your firm’s team members as knowledge leaders in the industry and their area of expertise.
Spread relevant, compelling messages and news about your firm and its team members or employees.
Increase the reputation and awareness of your firm among target audiences.
Increase reach/visibility of posts and engagement among target markets.
Maximize word-of-mouth marketing efforts through reviews.
So how can you use social media to accomplish those objectives? Whether you are an investment manager, accountant, lawyer, financial advisor, doctor, or a professional in some other field, these social media tips could be useful:
1. Provide a Human touch to your business.
In a professional services firm, your employees are your assets – and they are the ones who make your business different from your competitors. Through apt content creation and social media marketing, you can ‘humanize’ your business and introduce your team to better prospects in the following ways:
Communicate on social media by liking, commenting, and sharing others’ posts.
Post regular updates about employee awards won, volunteering work, or other community involvement.
Write articles and blog posts authored by team members. The subject matter should include expert advice specific to each team members’ niche within the industry.
2. Diffuse Valuable Knowledge
Post content that is valuable to your clients or prospects. If the content is not relevant, don’t waste your time – or theirs! If you continue to provide useful, helpful, or entertaining content, you will begin to build credibility among your followers. The goal is for your followers to view your team as thought-leaders in the industry so that your firm will be at the top of their mind when it’s time to hire someone for the job.
3) Choose expertise over only experience
Profession services providers must choose someone who is experienced who is experienced in their own industry’s niche but ready to foray into untested waters using new knowledge to manage their social media marketing efforts. Although the social media manager needs to be familiar with the industry, it is imminent that he or she understands how to produce the best Return on Investment (ROI) by upgrading their social media efforts.
Having taken you through the maze of dos and don’ts this will surely enlighten you on clever choices and aid your decision making leading to your success in engaging with your audience.