Social Networking Roundtable Recap
By Melissa Farmer, Somerset CPAs, P.C. and Hope Cooper, Alexander Thompson Arnold PLLC

We recently participated in the AAM Seasoned Marketer call on the topic of Social Networking. The speakers were Michelle Golden of Golden Practices and Amy Hoppenrath of AccelerAction. They are truly experts on this topic and presented a lot of great information—not to mention it was a bargain at only $10 and an hour of time.

The speakers did their homework up front and asked participants to take a survey and shared the results.

The data was interesting—see graph below for results reported:

A few quick nuggets picked up:

LinkedIn: To get recommendations, give them; try to make a recommendation once every two months or so. Think twice before recommending an associate of your firm. There could be legal ramifications if the associate is terminated.

Twitter: If you have several associates on Twitter, create a public list on the firm’s corporate Twitter page of those associates.

Blogs: Create sector-specific blogs for the industries your firm serves (i.e., health care, construction, nonprofit, etc.). If your firm has just one blog, they recommend NOT making it service-specific (i.e., tax). 

Effectiveness: Having a social media presence will not boost your company’s visibility or deliver on any of your other goals unless you use it. It’s like a telephone: if you don’t use it, it does you no good.   

One of the questions posed to the presenters was about how to create a social media policy. For tips, read Michelle’s article, “Charting A Firm's Social Media & Communications Policy,” on WebCPA and Amy’s article, “Building Your Social Media Plan For 2010” on KC Small Business.