7 Ways Accountants Can Use Enterprise Social Media

How can accountants use enterprise social media?

I am regularly asked about return on investment from using enterprise social media but unsurprisingly professional services and especially accountants ask it most frequently. As a result I’ve decided to list some ways that using social media can provide a return on investment for accountants.

Internal Communications

Many accountancy firms struggle with internal communications both nationally and internationally.  This means that companies often lose out on commercial opportunities around collaborative projects because the left hand simply doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. By using online community platforms like Telligent or Jive companies can become flatter and allow their employees and management to be more efficient in their communication. Internal communities are now proving to be more effective and more cost effective than intranets. The Financial times are utilising a bespoke online community for internal communication and the feedback has been that it has already made a big difference to their business and asset managers Blackrock have recently invested in Jive.

Ideas Sharing

An executive at Allianz told me the other day that they had implemented 11,000 ideas from employees to the benefit of the business. Social media platforms like Crowdworks are a fantastic way to leverage the intellectual might of the employees in your firm. Accountants have fantastic ideas every day on how to do things better, cheaper or more effectively. The Royal College of Nursing produced an idea to replace paper cups with china mugs and it allegedly saved the NHS £8m. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best and can save your business a fortune.

Thought Leadership

PWC, Delloitte, KPMG, E&Y, Mazars? Who is the best firm for niche areas of accountancy expertise? Let’s be honest with these fantastic brands the trust levels are going to be high from the outset but people buy from people and those who are perceived to have the most expertise in a certain area are often the most trusted and the most listened to. A thought leadership program through social media channels presents the individual or group of individuals as experts in the field. For example if you do a Google Blogsearch today on Solvency II, PWC currently dominates that conversational space and are miles ahead of their competitors, it may not make them the best in reality but it certainly makes the perception that they are the best. Clients who do any kind of online due diligence or research will be far more inclined to work with PWC than any of the others based on their online thought leadership today. The ironic thing is that without any major investment any small firm could dominate this online conversational space by regularly posting relevant articles online about the topic and getting engagement with their content by sharing it in the appropriate online spaces and channels.Search under your area or niche expertise today on Google Blogsearch and see who owns it.

Recruitment

We all know the high cost of executive search firms and head hunters. Using social media effectively can save considerable time and money by leveraging the contacts that your existing accountants already have. In 2011 tools like Jobvite or Linkedin’s referral engine encourage and incentivise staff to recommend their friends for jobs at their company and these tools can change the face of recruitment in many accountancy firms saving millions of pounds in agency fees per year. eSocialMedia also trains internal recruiters on how to leverage free social media tools effectively.

Business Development

Every business wants to win more business and to grow existing accounts. Business conversations happen every day, in person, on the phone, via email and now via online communications and social media. These conversations, regardless of where they happen are pretty much the same. For example: If you phone up a prospect and spend 10 minutes talking about yourself and your company the chances are that the prospect will switch off. Well in social media it is exactly the same principle, you have to engage people in the online conversations that interest them most. Add value, offer advice and help and you are far more likely for that prospect to open up and tell you their challenges. Sales and business development people need to be trained on how to listen, target and engage online. Luckily one thing that partners are good at talking about is business and accounting so there is usually no problem getting them to have online engagement once they discuss the topics that are relevant to their market.

Client Retention

Everyday companies are online discussing their accountancy firms, the good ones, the bad ones and the ones they haven’t yet worked with. By using social media monitoring companies can identify when unhappy clients are airing their views online and customer services can intervene with a solution to their problem. In other scenarios the competition will be courting your existing clients in open spaces online and explaining why they should go to them. Using social media monitoring can identify these opportunities and allow you to jump right into the conversation and rescue your client.

Reputation Crisis Management

In accountancy, reputation and trust is everything when it comes to wining and retaining clients. So what happens when a story breaks in the press linking you to a failed business or a failed project? It taints your reputation and seriously effects peoples’ buying decisions when deciding whether to work with you or not. Having a reputation crisis management strategy can help to know when people are discussing you in association with a particular issue or problem and can help you inform the market of the real facts when a compromising story breaks online.

There are literally hundreds of other different ways that social media can be used by accountancy firms but understanding that professional services are delivered as a result of interactions between clients and accountants and understanding that enterprise social media  is simply an extension of those social interactions is the first step in getting started.

Let me know your thoughts @ColmHannon