The landscape of doing business through advertising has changed dramatically. In the digital age we live in, information travels like wild fire. Whether it’s a happy client telling their followers on Twitter how wonderful your service is, or a disgruntled one telling theirs not to bother with you, you’d be mad to consider social media anything other than a necessity. It’s free advertising, but a lethal tool if a business doesn’t use it properly.
Take a look – from enormous brands to one-man bands, every savvy business that wants to engage directly with prospective new clients is doing so on social media. In the North-east, we have the fantastic #NorthEastHour online networking session, which happens twice a week, where local business people and general movers and shakers can engage with each other, promote their services and critically; share each other’s content. At Inspire, we get involved with North East Hour by both sharing our own content, and retweeting the content of our fellow tweeters. Nine times out of ten, someone will return the favour and you never know who that tweet will reach.
As an accountancy and financial management practice, the tricky part was identifying our ‘voice’. We’re a professional service, so colloquial and informal tweets just wouldn’t do. That said, the last thing we wanted to do was come across as a set of stuffy accountants let loose with an iPad. That’s one bit of critical advice I would give; take the time to discuss with your team the voice you want to portray to the Twittersphere, ensuring that every team member using your social accounts is on the same page. Once you’ve done that, apply the same logic to the short space for a biography – summarise your service in a friendly, professional manner and provide the means for followers to get in touch. It’s that simple.
But, does all this work? I hear you ask. Well, #NorthEastHour frequently features as a trending topic and the account itself has almost 20,000 followers; so that’s quite a large reach potential. Additionally, social media allows businesses a platform to promote special offers or service updates and see the response pretty much immediately. So in that way, yes, it works. It’s then up to you to get in touch and turn that tweet into a client. By ensuring your website is up to date and better still, you have a blog feature on there to update followers with both internal and trade affairs, you can maximise your search engine popularity as well as identifying your business as a go-to provider of relevant, topical information.
Want to discuss your experience of using social media to attract clients? Tweet us! You can get in touch with the Inspire team by tweeting @InspireFMLtd.