Top 10 reasons why social media is a must for professional service firms

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for building a firm’s brand strength. It is a great platform to showcase one’s reputation, expertise and credibility, and achieve reach and visibility to a wider community of people never engaged before.  

Here are ten reasons why social media is vital and an important business tool for professional service firms:

1. Target your audience: Grow your customer base and find your ideal clients. For instance, Facebook allows you to directly target a specific audience based on personal information such as your ideal client’s demographic, interests and lifestyle choices.

2. Client engagement: Improve the client experience journey by engaging directly with your clients on the platforms where they are already interacting and consuming information.

3. Competitor research: Understand your competitors by watching how they interact on social media, who their clients are, as well as where and how they’re speaking to them.

4. Online networking: Transform traditional methods of networking to online. Face to face networking is still important but couple it with social media, and you have an instant, easier and less expensive way to connect with other professionals and build relationships with clients and prospects.

5. Communication channel: Why not provide a new way of communicating between yourself and your clients? With over a billion users of Facebook, why wouldn’t you want to make it easy for your clients to communicate with you in their preferred channel?

6. Reputation: Build your reputation and credibility online. A strong online presence builds your firm’s visibility, reach and influence, and ultimately creates brand awareness.

7. Build trust: Face to face trust factors are important but these days, clients like to experience and learn more about the firms before they engage one. This means trust is being built online by clients without your knowledge, and they source information about you on social media. If you’re not on social media, then you don’t even make the initial shortlist.

8. Education, education & education: Social media can create an educational experience that’s mutually beneficial. Clients can learn about your expertise, knowledge and how you help solve client’s problems, and vice versa, you can learn about your client’s likes, interests, preferences and behaviours to enable targeted and personalised messages.

9. Reach business goals: Whether your goal is to create brand awareness, send people to your website, generate client leads, watch your corporate videos, contact your office or reach ideal clients near your business location, social media is packed with all these business building tools and features.

10. Recruitment tool: Used effectively, platforms like LinkedIn can help find the right candidates and help you ‘fish where the fish are’.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to add value as a trusted advisor in the industry, and we believe that, as firms of the future, investing in a social media strategy is essential to thriving in today’s digital landscape.