5 Ways to Create a Social Media Strategy

Are you looking for a simple, cost-effective way to grow your practice? Business growth is a vast concept, but that doesn’t mean you need expensive tools to get your name out there and build your audience. Quickly grow your practice and lay the groundwork for your marketing strategy with reasonable effort on your end by following these five social media tips.

#1: Develop Client Personas. Before you start building out your online presence, you need to develop a clear idea of who your target audience is. In the marketing space, this is called developing a client persona. While it sounds complex, developing your client personas is a matter of documenting the personalities and qualities (gender, age, income and location) of the prospects you’re targeting through social media. 

#2: Figure Out Which Platform is Right for You. Not all social media platforms are the same. When you’re posting information on the web, you’ll want to ensure you’re posting the right material to where your target audience is. On Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, you only have a few seconds to get your users’ attention to share and like your posts. Facebook posts should be conversational, as if you were talking to a friend about business. Twitter is more straightforward and to the point, so you’ll want to focus on asking useful questions or stating helpful facts. The key to success on LinkedIn is sharing helpful knowledge and showing thought leadership in your space, through relevant professional content.

As with messaging, post frequency also varies based on the networks you’re targeting. For example, most businesses post around five to 10 times daily on Twitter, compared to one to four times a day on Facebook and LinkedIn. Make sure you are also following proper social media etiquette.

#3: Influencer Marketing. Now that social media is used in virtually all industries, influencer marketing is taking off as one of the most popular tools to growing businesses. This marketing technique revolves around using industry leaders to drive the brand’s message to the industries and audiences you choose. You can use tools such as Followerwonk to not only find influencers in the tax and accounting space, but also get a handle on their audience and follower base demographics.

#4: Pay-Per-Click and Social Media. It used to be that companies could just create social media profiles and immediately start driving traffic to their websites. However, today, social media marketing is a pay-to-play space. Although creating company profiles on leading social media platforms is free, brands typically have to pay to get their posts promoted or differentiated from the pack. Fortunately, you don’t need extravagant budgets for pay-per-click on social media.

Platforms, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, for example, enable you to target your posts based on geography, age, interest and a variety of other dimensions pulled from user profiles. There are some platforms that offer free ad coupons for first-time advertisers or promotions. When combined with the flexible ad spending packages, you can be sure your advertising budget is getting the right traffic for your posts.

#5: Analyze Results. As you’re developing your platform, you’ll need to continuously monitor your traffic to ensure it’s aligned with your target audience. Here is a brief overview of the metrics to consider and when they should work best:

• If you’re looking to generate traffic, focus on unique visitors from social websites where you’re running your campaigns.
• If you’re looking to create a following, focus on subscribers and followers on your target social media channels.
• If you’re looking to increase engagement, focus on the amount of comments, replies and mentions.
• If you’re looking to generate revenue, focus on measuring the revenue from each of your posts.

Making the Process Less Overwhelming

Although developing a complete social media plan requires a bit of work, that doesn’t mean it has to be overwhelming. The biggest factor to remember is that you should only create profiles on the social networks that matter to your audience. For example, unless you’re reselling software, it might not make sense to use Pinterest. If you’re not comfortable on Twitter, then focus your resources on Facebook and LinkedIn. By allocating your resources correctly, your social media strategy should get off to a good start.

Editor’s Note: To help develop your social media strategy, check out “5 Online/Social Communities for Tax Professionals” and “5 Secrets to Finding New Clients.”

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