Practical Steps to Improve Your Presence & Engage Your Audience on Social Media
The longer we work remotely, the more important our digital footprint becomes. Historically, those seeking consultation weren’t media users; However, in today’s world your firm’s online presence is just as important as your physical presence. Social media has become one of the most influential spaces to interact with your prospective and current clients.
Professional services firms depend heavily on relationships and reputation with their clients. Those relationships are built on traits such as honesty, reliability, and intellectual leadership – all of which can be exhibited through social media. See our blog Why Use Social Media in B2B? for details on why you should allocate resources to social media and a few tricks on how to engage your audience.
People want to do business with other people, not businesses. Humanizing your business is a must. Social media allows you to do just that by interacting and conversing online with friends or followers, as well as groups and forums. In this blog, we will focus on LinkedIn. Here are a few practical steps to improve your presence & engage your target audience:
Think of LinkedIn as your commercial. Your profile should include who you are, why you do what you do and what others say about you. It should show your personality, the organizations you believe in and are associated with. If you haven’t updated your profile in the last 6 months, spend time in your account reviewing what’s there and what your profile is telling the market. Why should your prospect work with you versus your competitor? Looking at your profile should answer this question.
You do not need to spend hours a day, but carve out 15-30 minutes to review your feed, comment and like on other posts. Connect with key prospects, clients, and centers of influence. Join conversations in the comments and add value to the topic shared. Tag your prospects and clients that you are thinking of, as you post or read about a particular post. Consider posting 2-3 times a week on your page and periodically using LinkedIn Pulse. LinkedIn Pulse works like a blog, and it allows you to dive deeper into a topic and showcase your expertise. If you work with compliance, this is a perfect way to repurpose approved content.
Be aware of the conversations that are happening about your business elsewhere online and respond where deemed appropriate. This is known as social listening. Social listening gives your firm an opportunity to track, analyze, and respond to conversations. Then put the information gained form conversation into action. It can be something as small as responding to a happy customer or listening to a customer’s suggestion to build a relationship with your clients.
Virtually everything that you communicate via social media will be subject to some type of approval, review, and surveillance. Since the approval process timeframes range from days to weeks depending on the number of iterations, plan your posts a month in advance so you have sufficient time for the approval process. See our blog Why Use Social Media in B2B? for a few “how to” tips and hacks. Creating original content in general is tricky and probably should be minimized or avoided in your social media strategy. Content regarding personal life, involvement in church or community events, support for charities or social causes may be a source of original content that can be presented without pre-approval BUT your OSJ’s policies should be reviewed.
The key is to keep it simple and focus on adding value with social media. It can be a time drain without achieving the results that you need if you don’t have a plan and a process. If you’d like a digital footprint valuation to better understand how your prospective clients view you or to discuss how you can improve your social media plan, do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected] or (513) 309-0719.