6 social media tips for accountants

With 57% of the world population on social media, it makes sense that it’s such an effective way to market a business. As an accountant, social media can help you find the right clients for your practice. But you may wonder how to use these platforms effectively to connect with your target audience and convert them into customers. 

This guide will list seven social media tips for accountants, including: 

• Find your audience
• Consider the platforms 
• Set goals
• Plan ahead
• Engage with your audience 
• Measure your progress

One of the most important social media tips for accountants is to consider your target audience. To determine who you’re targeting, ask yourself who your perfect customer is. 

Research has found that targeted marketing is one of the best ways to drive demand. As an accountant, you may be working in the private or public sector, targeting small businesses and seeking an older demographic of business owners.

To do this, consider questions like: 

• What do they do? 
• How can you help them? 
• What are they interested in? 

Defining your target customer will help you figure out what content to post on social media and how to reach the right people. Understanding behaviour patterns will help you predict how these people interact with the platforms.  

For example, a small business owner might join relevant groups on Facebook or tweet with a specific industry hashtag. If you anticipate behaviour, search these hashtags or groups and find the right people. By understanding their interests and needs, you can plan your content with them in mind. 

Once you determine your target audience, you can use this to find the right social media for marketing as each platform has a slightly different demographic. 

With this in mind, you may want to focus on LinkedIn. This platform is more business-focused with an older demographic of about 46 to 55 years on average. LinkedIn would be a great place to target small businesses and professionals in need of accountants. 

Also, with 2.9 billion active monthly users and a slightly younger average audience of 25-35 years, finding your audience on Facebook is always possible. Many small businesses create Facebook profiles that you can engage with. Plus, consider finding and joining viable groups. 

Aside from LinkedIn and Facebook, you can effectively market your accountant firm on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. In fact, a diverse approach can help you reach more people since you’ll interact with different users on each platform. 

Another social media tip for accountants is to set goals for your marketing. By planning for results, you can focus your efforts specifically. For example, maybe you want to increase your leads and convert more of those leads into customers. This will alter your social media behaviour differently than if you aim to grow brand awareness. 

Aside from your overarching goals, also consider your social media strategy goals. Maybe you want to dedicate a certain amount of time to it each week or to post a particular number of times each month. Having a plan will help you maintain continuous engagement with the platforms to sustain relevancy. 

A well-thought-out plan is the best way to make your strategy effective and helps you avoid going in blind. One of the best ways to build a plan is by creating a content list. This way, you can outline ideas you specifically curate for your audience.

For accountants, you may want to consider content ideas like:

• Accounting and finance tips 
• Holiday posts 
• Quote of the day 
• Deals and discounts 
• Interesting news updates 
• Updates on your business and family or pets

To come up with ideas, consider looking at similar profiles to yours to see what content they’re posting. Alternatively, you can research hashtags that will help you reach the right people. This well-planned approach can help you appear both professional and personable to your audience. 

To stick to your content and engagement goals, consider compiling a calendar. This content calendar will lay out your social media plan, such as when you’ll post what on each platform. You can also give yourself engagement metrics. For example, maybe you want to post on each platform once a week and respond, message, or like five user’s posts a week. 

Truly effective social media marketing is about more than just posting. Also try interacting with the other users to build relationships and maintain relevancy. 

Engagement can start with the content you post. To increase the intractability of your posts, consider asking your audience questions, incorporating pole functions, photos and links. This will promote clicks and activity around your content, which can hopefully lead to conversions. 

On top of posting, make sure you interact with other users. Like and comment on other posts, respond to comments on your own. Join conversations and post in relevant groups to help you cast a wider net on the platforms. 

When you’ve incorporated these social media tips for accountants, it will help you grow your audience to sell your practice. But one of the most crucial tactics for your marketing’s effectiveness is to measure your progress. 

Forming metrics will help you know which tactics are working. For example, you could track things like your brand awareness, engagement, or conversion metrics.  

Brand awareness metrics can show how much attention your content gets while engagement rates analyse how many people interact with your content. Finally, conversion metrics track the new clients you earn from social media efforts. To better understand these metrics, you may want to track your growth rate or average post outreach (how many people your posts reach on average). You can also calculate conversion and click through rates. 

There are plenty of tools to use for measuring these metrics, including Google Analytics, Sprout Social, and Falcon. These tools will not only track your social media results, but also analyse the data and offer insights on how to improve your methods. Overall, measuring your efforts is a great way to understand their effectiveness. 

You can save your practice time on manual admin and help your clients keep organised records with Countingup’s free accounting software. It’s built specifically to help you manage your self-employed and sole trader clients.

The app automates time-consuming bookkeeping admin for your clients so they can focus on running their business—and send you accurate, structured data to work from. 

Countingup’s accounting software is MTD-compatible and full of features for you to efficiently review and manage client accounts with direct access to their real-time organised data.

Find out more here.