Marketing Your CPA Practice: Find New Clients for Your Practice with LinkedIn and Online Social Networking
When it comes to social networking, there's frequently a division between accounting firms and a practical impression of the significance of the advantages particular online networking services can bestow. There are numerous such sites available. Facebook, Twitter, Ping.fm, Multiply, Google, Tumblr... and accountants who are looking to the future need to familiarize themselves with all of them. Arguably the most material of these sites, from a business networking perspective, is a site called LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is not unlike Facebook in numerous ways. It offers profiles, allows status updates, and lets users create and join groups. Unlike Facebook, however, LinkedIn offers business rather than social contacts. Instead of your connections sharing pictures of their cat, the focus is on employment, networking, references, and virtually anything else you'll need in the business world.
This is reflected in your profile, which is dominated by your current employers, and expanded on further down by descriptions of your experience, past and present, recommendations from clients and coworkers, and a personal "summary" where you can highlight your specialties. You can also include your website, Twitter, and even any instant-messaging handles you may have at the bottom.
Once you have all this filled in (LinkedIn will give you a percentage-to-completion box on the right side, indicating how ready you are to get out and start networking), you're free to start connecting with contacts, requesting recommendations, and joining groups. One of the nice things about LinkedIn is that it's like a dynamic resume--constantly updating and showing up-to-date progress, while providing an ever-changing face for potential clients.
But where LinkedIn provides many opportunities to its users, it isn't going to do the work for you.
The key, says Barry Macquarrie, "is participation". Macquarrie, who is director of technology at the KAF Financial Group, recently posted a blog on CPA2Biz outlining seven essential LinkedIn activities. The first four are fairly straightforward: first you sign up, maintain a complete profile, update your status, and connect with your clients or employers. The other three are more involved, such as joining groups, which will allow CPAs to interact with those they share interests with, sharing links, and following other companies and competition.
In addition, Macquarrie has also provided a list of the sort of groups CPAs should join, such as those maintained by their company, competition, and practice. He also recommends his own group, SocialCPAs, AICPA, your state's CPA society, and the International CPA Association.
You already understand the significance of social networking. Don't let the benefits made possible by online networking websites get away. Take advantage of social networking websites, and LinkedIn is the proper place to begin. There's no telling how far it can take you, and like most new technologies it's the people that adopt it first that will benefit the most from it.
Brian O'Connell is the owner and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's most successful website design businesses oriented solely to accounting website design. His firm currently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and tax preparation firms.
