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LinkedIn: Are you reaching your potential?

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25th Nov 2014
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While Twitter is a social media tool that is growing in popularity, some accountants are yet to realise the potential of LinkedIn for marketing, as well as recruitment purposes, says Stephen Hagues of Retiring Accountant.

With this sole recruitment focus, the opportunity is often missed to use this tool to effectively market your business to the right people. LinkedIn collates many strands of information in the sign-up process and gathers information on what the users are interested in. This means you can really target who you want to reach. For example, you can use the advanced search to find business people that live in a particular area.

Recent research from Econsultancy suggests that LinkedIn is responsible for 64% of visits to corporate websites from any social media site, miles ahead of Twitter. By linking to content in status updates on LinkedIn, accountants can drive followers to evidence of their expertise, which ultimately is necessary to get referrals.

Regularly updating your status on LinkedIn can improve your engagement with your connections and drive traffic to your company site. Perhaps through sharing new blog posts, linking to articles on your website and promoting  your seminars or webinars, ultimately directing  users to your site to sign up for them.

It seems like a good strategy to share these ideas. According to the site's own numbers, 60% of their users are most interested in what they call 'industry insights'. 'Company news' comes in second, with 'new products and services' coming third.

In terms of company news, LinkedIn, as a community of business people, is a useful place to promote and build your identity as a firm. This may be through announcing staff appointments, revealing your company's results, celebrating accolades and showing your responsibilities as a business, such as a charity fundraiser event. 

Not only can this help build a brand identity, but effective use of LinkedIn can help accountants build their centres of influence from their connections, such as solicitors, financial advisers and other business professionals.

As with any form of social media, the way to realise its full potential is to focus on engagement and that means getting involved in conversations. This could be through answering and asking questions on LinkedIn, but also through joining groups, which are 'mini networks' where you can have conversations with fellow business professionals. Rather than just joining the groups relevant to you and your peers, you should join ones that are of interest to clients.

LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups and so join those that will have members in your target group, like business owners in your town. The same group can also give you a reason to connect to someone on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn stats are worth having a looking at. They can show you what your connections are interested in and so can help you market events and relevant content that may be of interest to particular connections.

Using LinkedIn analytics, the engagement percentage rate tracks the number of followers, interactions, and clicks generated for each update. By understanding and checking these statistics, it can help you improve the way you update your profile to make the most use of LinkedIn.

A company profile on LinkedIn should be considered as your shop window, just like your website is. Accountants' own and company profile on LinkedIn should be used to say how they can help clients and other professional connections, rather than just a straightforward run-down of background and skills, to help them get referrals.

Owners of financial accountancy practices need to market their own brand as a business professional through LinkedIn, as building up a network of contacts can help introduce them to others who may not be aware of their expertise as a firm. Often, professional services firms become synonymous with those who run the business, and so marketing yourself can help market your business as well.

Therefore, make an effort to make your LinkedIn profile as attractive as possible. To find out more about how to create an attractive LinkedIn profile, view our webcast.

Another advantage of LinkedIn is that it does not need constant monitoring like other forms of social media such as Twitter. However, the biggest benefit is it allows you to market your firm to business professionals that could become clients or key contacts.

While getting started on social media may seem to be a large investment of time before you can get results, putting time in is worth it with this free medium as another string to add to your marketing bow. Consistency on social media is everything and investing the time, even a short amount over a longer period, can really see it pay off.

 

Stephen Hagues is the founder of Retiring Accountant, a leading business acquisition specialist that operates across the UK broking deals between accountancy firms.

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