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communication and promotion strategy with social media

Lighting the way

Here are eight great examples of some of the most cutting-edge social media usage by accountants to help you take your own firm’s strategy up a notch, chosen by Diana Mackie, a small-business writer and chief content officer at Funding Gates.

For more details, you can see her full story here.

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A new social frontier

Accountant Cathy Iconis took the Twitter-based chat, or “Tweet chat,” one step further by starting her own accounting Tweet chat. She now runs the most popular QuickBooks Tweetchat, #QBOChat, and even created a branded QBOChat Web site to host the weekly live chat, thereby owning all of the traffic from Twitter and the Tweet chat.
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Facebook to the max

Top 100 Firm Eide Bailly not only has a handsome-looking Facebook page, but it also makes excellent use of Facebook Page Apps. The firm also does a great job sharing interesting and diverse content to Facebook — a healthy mix of industry news, photos, topical content, fun behind-the-scenes content, and firm accomplishments. Importantly, all of their posts contain some kind of imagery.
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Pinterest is in your best interest

Vincent Servello, a Boston CPA, has done an excellent job of curating boards that relate to his business (accounting and personal finance), as well as his niche focuses (the construction industry and real estate). Crucial to success on Pinterest is mixing up your business content with traffic-driving “fun” pins like those for his office decor, cool technology, or his home-run hit, “dream” Pinterest board: What Will You Do With The Money You’ve Saved?
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Audio, it’s going to be big

Stacy Kildal, Woody Adams and Dawn Brolin are doing incredibly fabulous things with their weekly broadcast, which started as the audio show Radio Free QuickBooks, and has morphed into The QB Show. Focusing on QuickBooks, they cover a wide variety of tips, tricks and interviews, and answer actual accountant and business questions. From a single podcast, they are able to get lasting Web content for their archives, tips for pure content marketing purposes, video assets, blogs, and, of course, social posts.
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Video, it’s going to be even bigger

Major kudos to the Ohio Society of CPAs for putting on a professional, top-notch show on YouTube. Their Tax Planning Strategies series is particularly well done and highly professional — check out the very social media-friendly video, Top 10 Tax Tips For The Self Employed for a great example of video content opportunities for accountants.
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Beyond the LinkedIn profile

Cultivating an active and engaged group of professionals on LinkedIn is no small feat, and I am especially impressed with Robert Half Finance’s LinkedIn group for Finance & Accounting, which has a whopping 12,333 members. The content shared is helpful and insightful and it’s always accompanied by an engaging discussion in the comments.
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Content creation — a social home run

Props must be given to Stuff Accountants Like, a site run anonymously by one or more persons from “a Big4 public accounting background.” Though the site hasn’t been updated since 2009, it still ranks highly in Google, and their blogs continue to appear regularly as shared links on social media.
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In-house social media amplification

Top 100 Firm CliftonLarsonAllen is able to reach an impressively wide audience just from utilizing its own team’s social networks and connections. Eighty of the firm’s partners use their social networks to spread the word about eight of the firm’s specific industry practice areas.
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