So now that you know why you should be posting social media updates and what you can expect, you may be wondering how can you actually do this?
Here’s the process we follow. You can do this yourself, or get our help to do it for you.
Step 1: Research a list of relevant websites
Think about the blogs, YouTube videos, etc that your potential clients visit and would find interested to read or watch.
Make a list of those website URL’s. We suggest keeping a Gsheet that the whole team can add to – so it’s an ongoing list.
If you’re not sure, you can use Google to help you.
Try searching on Google for topics such as “Best [your client’s industry] blogs” and you can usually find a list of good websites with relevant topics.
For example a quick search for “best creative agency blogs” in google came up with this result:
Step 2: Find content from the websites in your list
Whenever you want to post more social media updates, just refer back to the list and go through them.
You can also import the RSS feed of your list into tools such as Feed.ly to save you some time, rather than opening each website on your list one by one.
Make sure you include your own content from your blog, YouTube channel, etc as well as other people’s content too!
Top tip: It might also be a good idea to include websites & blogs from your strategic partners, suppliers and maybe even your clients! At The Profitable Firm, we have a list of strategic partners and awesome people who produce fantastic content that would be relevant for accountants.
Step 3: Schedule content from the websites in your list
As you go through the list, manually choose the articles, videos, etc that you think will be good to schedule out.
There are some tools out there that will automatically post every article or video from a certain website (or sometimes they will even choose the website for you). I don’t recommend you do that. It will look too robotic and sometimes these automated tools will post things you don’t even like!
Instead, carefully choose what you want to share.
Then use scheduling software such as Hootsuite, Sendible, MeetEdgar or Buffer to schedule social media updates to all your social media channels.
What tool you use really comes down to your own personal preference. For me, I love Sendible and Buffer. For most accountants who are just starting out I recommend Buffer as it’s super easy to use.
I don’t really mind what software you use as long as you make sure it does the job!
A few other final things to keep in mind:
1. Choose a nice looking image with each social media update that you schedule out.
2. Where possible, tag people on social media channels such as Twitter to get even more reach.
For example, if you have an article that you share from the ReceiptBank blog, why not tag ReceiptBank in the social media post too? We had a client that we did this and their engagement skyrocketed because ReceiptBank retweeted their post to their thousands of followers.
3. Use one or two relevant hashtags on the post (but don’t go overboard with this one! It’s not as important as it used to be and how you use hashtags can also depend on what social media platform you use).
If you don’t post on social daily, get someone who can!
If researching, scheduling and optimising your social media updates each day on all your social media channels sounds great, but it’s not something you have the time, or even want to be doing, then you can easily in-source or outsource it.
In fact, one of our “done-for-you” packages for accountants is “Daily social media updates”.
You only need to spend about 5-10 minutes once a month approving the social media updates that we research for you and then we do the rest!
If you’d like to learn more, this video explains how it all works:
Want to see if we can help your accountancy firm with your daily social media updates? Book a meeting with me by clicking here.
About the Author
Ashley Davis is the Social Media Director at The Profitable Firm and also works with small to medium sized businesses at Skyline Social.