Tax News By Christopher: Social Media Guide for Tax Business Owners

Have you been promoting your tax business on social media? If not, you should be. It has been estimated that the average person spends nearly two hours on social media every day. That’s a lot of screen time your business could be capitalizing on! As social media channels become more prevalent (and more continue to crop up), screen time is only going to increase (and may even take over some of our t.v. time).

It’s crucial for your business to have a presence on social media. Not only does it increase your exposure, it makes you competitive with national firms and is expected among consumers. The problem most tax business owners face when it comes to social media is how to best leverage it and break through the noise. Here is a simple guide with best practices that will show you how each channel can be used to increase exposure.

Facebook

With over 1 billion users, it’s hard to ignore the importance of Facebook. The most important thing to remember about this channel is that consistency and engagement are crucial. Facebook uses an algorithm to determine what content it serves up to each user. This means that everyone who likes your company Facebook page won’t necessarily see every post. It all depends on how engaged they are with your content.

Facebook Best Practices

Post daily to keep your audience engaged
Consider these questions before posting: Would my audience find this valuable? Would I share it?
Use a mix of images (like infographics, pics, quotes), video, and links.
It’s ok to post blog posts more than once on Facebook, just make sure you spread them out.
Highlight your staff and show off your company culture. This adds more personality to your page and can help your audience connect to you.
Go Live! Facebook Live is a great way to mix it up. Live videos get more reach than other types of posts.
Share content from referral partners or complimentary local businesses and be sure to tag them.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to help boost special announcements and promotions or just give you some increased reach. The great thing about Facebook ads is you can target very specific demographics. Here are some interesting ways you can target people on Facebook:

Location (choose a specific radius around your business)
Income level
Newly weds, new home buyers, new parents (anything that could change their tax situation)
Business Owners
People on your email list
Specific households, job titles, and interests

Metrics

Facebook Insights is a great place to go for metrics. Metrics you should be looking for:

Likes
Engagement
Reach
Referral traffic to website (you can find that metric in Google Analytics)

LinkedIn is also a must when it comes to social media for tax business owners. LinkedIn is strictly professional and can be a great way to network with potential clients. Think of LinkedIn as an extension of your networking. Staying in touch with your network and building relationships could not be easier.

LinkedIn Best Practices

Connect with everyone you meet so you can stay in touch.
Read your newsfeed daily and engage with your connections.
Follow influencers in your industry (or in marketing) to stay on-top of the latest trends.
Join LinkedIn Groups and contribute to them in a meaningful way (start by joining Tax Business Owners of America).
Post regularly (early in the morning is the best time). Make sure you’re posting your company blogs on LinkedIn.
Create a LinkedIn Company page and post regularly to it.
Make sure all of your employees are connected to your company page and encourage them to share your updates.
Do you or your employees have a certificate from The Income Tax School? Add it to your profile.
Use LinkedIn’s advanced search capabilities to find potential clients and/or potential employees.

LinkedIn Ads

Just like Facebook, LinkedIn has a very robust ads platform that can help you get in front of the right people. Because of the business nature of the platform, there are different targeting capabilities on LinkedIn. You can target by location, occupation, industry, seniority, company, and much more.

Metrics

LinkedIn has insights as well for both pages and for people. Here are some metrics to pay attention to:

Who’s viewed your profile (personal)
Views of your post (personal)
Article views (personal)
Followers (company page)
Engagement (company page)
Reach (company page)

Blog

Company blogs are a great way to show off your knowledge, provide value to your clients or potential clients and give people a reason to keep coming back to your website. They also give you great content for your social media channels.

Blogging Best Practices

Maintain an editorial calendar to plan topics ahead of time.
Speak in plain language – no legalese or tax terms.
Keep your posts between 500 and 700 words.
Use headers to break up your posts into easily digestible or scannable chunks.
Blog about topics that your clients are interested in or ask questions about.

Metrics

Are people reading your blogs? Your Google Analytics will tell you. Make sure you have Google Analytics set up so that you can track how many people are visiting each blog post.

Twitter

Twitter is a fast-paced social media platform that communicates in 140 characters at a time. Twitter is used by bloggers, business owners, and journalists as a networking tool, and is very popular with journalists who use it to find story leads.

Twitter Best Practices

Set aside time to read your feed and interact with people daily or weekly.
Follow local news media (and the journalists who write about the industry).
Follow businesses and individuals in your community.
Use a tool like Hootsuite to listen for conversations and mentions of your company and to schedule tweets.
Write 5-10 tweets to promote each blog post you write. Schedule these to post every other day after each blog is written.
Respond when others tag you.
Sharing is caring. RT (retweet) others and tag people when you tweet their articles.
Plan and write tweets ahead of time and then schedule them weekly.
Use hashtags.

Metrics

Twitter analytics is a great place to go to see how you’re doing on the platform. Here are some analytics to pay attention to:

Followers
Impressions
Mentions
Top Tweets

Other Social Media Channels

The key to social media is not to be on every channel imaginable. It’s all about finding the channels your target audience uses the most and that suit your business and the type of content you are able to produce. Know your strengths and only focus on the channels you are capable of managing. That said, here are some best practices for other social media channels that might suit you.

Instagram

Research relevant hashtags in your community and use no more than 10 in each post.
Upload high quality images.
Stick to a particular look for all of your Instagram photos so that your feed is consistent and compelling.
Post regularly throughout the week.
Comment and like other Instagram photos.
Follow influencers and people in the community.
Tag others in photos when it makes sense.

Use target keywords in file names and pin descriptions.
Pin blog posts as well as images.
Create compelling infographics that break down processes or explain complicated tax topics.
Make sure your photos are high quality.
Re-pin other pins and follow people who follow you.
Use taller images that take up more space in the Pinterest feed.
Credit your sources by linking to their site.

YouTube

Make content, not ads.
Tell stories.
Make sure your videos are high quality and shorter in length (under two minutes).
Include descriptions with keywords for each video.
Link back to your website in the about section.
Create videos that teach and engage.
Read and respond to comments.

So how do you manage all of this and run a tax business? There are some great tools out there that will help my allowing you to monitor everything in one dashboard and schedule posts. Hootsuite and Buffer are two great tools to check out. If it’s just too overwhelming, you can hire a professional, like Emergent Social Solutions to help you!

More Great Reads:

Get Social in 2017: A Social Media Checklist for Tax Offices

Get More Done During Tax Season with Technology

5 Essentials to Developing a Client Newsletter