Digital Marketing for Professional Services Firms, Part 3: Social Media Tactics

So you want to up your digital marketing game for your firm. You’ve gone through my post about the foundations of digital marketing, and you’ve learned why using social media is important. Now, it’s time to lay out the principles for social success. Here are 5 key rules to follow.

1. Define goals: My last post was all about the different outcomes that you can achieve with social media. It’s a considerably long list, so decide what the biggest priorities are for your firm. These will inform how you approach everything. For example...

• If you’re trying to be more visible, you might want to put more effort into engaging with others and sharing more content that doesn’t take too long to find or create.

• If you’re more concerned with positioning yourself as a thought leader, take the time to craft truly helpful articles or videos.

• If your main goal is to make your firm appear unique and personable, leverage your staff to showcase what goes on behind the scenes. Think about asking your clients to talk about their experiences too.

2. Share your original ideas: As I noted in my first post, your clients pay you for your expertise. If you’ve been blogging on your website, social media is the place to share your insights. Even if you don’t blog regularly—or at all—you can use social networks to share your professional opinion on matters relevant to your industry. If you come across an article you find interesting, don’t hesitate to share it with your network.

3. Make a consistent effort: Do it or don’t. Your efforts will be undercut if you don’t post regularly, or if it looks like you put no time into what you write and share.

Whether you choose one or multiple social networks, post consistently. Take advantage of scheduling tools like HootSuite or Buffer to line up all your posts for the week. An important caveat, though, is that these tools don’t currently work for LinkedIn’s Groups feature. This means that if you want to share your thoughts in the professional forums on the site, you’ll have to take the time to do it manually.

4. Don’t forget to engage: Whether or not you’re scheduling your posts in advance, you need to take some time to interact with other people. You don’t have to spend hours figuring out who to follow or liking every single post. Instead, take a few minutes every day to write comments, answer questions, find accounts to follow, or otherwise engage with others.

5. Track it. Take note of variables like post time, content, network, and so on in order to optimize your strategies.

If you’ve decided to make a big commitment to your online presence, you should also either learn Google Analytics (or a similar tool) or hire someone to help you. This way, you can understand how many people are visiting your website, and how social media is playing into that traffic.

However, if you’re just dipping your toe in the water, at least make it standard procedure to ask leads how they learned about your firm. After all, you need to know if your efforts are paying off! If you follow these 5 guidelines, though, they definitely should.