At present I seem to be gaining lots of new clients in the professional services arena – solicitors, accountants, surveyors and the like. Although this means that I’m not getting the variation that I perhaps might have been, it does mean that I’ve got some great insight into both the issues and peculiarities of these industries and the fears they have about social media adoption.
Here are some of the more popular questions/objections and my most popular answers to them!
- our clients don’t use social media – yes they do! Nowadays social media spans all socio-economic groups – Facebook has nearly 600 million members, LinkedIn 95 million, Twitter 175 million. It should also be noted that all of the major social networks are growing very quickly too, so the individual clients that you want to engage if not on them already, will be soon!
- we need to be careful giving advice on these platforms as we may be liable – as a professional services company one would assume that your staff are reasonably intelligent. They have ‘social interaction’ when dealing with clients, when at networking meetings and when socialising with friends and in all of these instances they will probably be sharing their expertise – they just need to use the same care as they would in other places!
- we don’t have time to use social media – if like so many professional services companies your key fee earners play an active role in the networking and business meetings that the firm engages in – staff will regularly invest 3+ hours in a meeting with the same people every week without any clear vehicle for converting this into business. Social Media offers a simple way of tracking and keeping alive these relationships to ensure that YOU are always front of mind.
- we want to get our marketing department to do it for us – not a good plan! Whilst the marketing department can certainly help collate photos, help write profiles and help follow-up, they must update statuses and tweet for you – this would be as unproductive as them going to networking groups or client meetings on your behalf.
- we don’t want to use social media to engage our clients – the truth is that it doesn’t matter what YOU want. Social media is about meeting people where THEY want to meet and using the language that THEY want to use.
- we hear so many Facebook horror stories we don’t think that it’s safe for us to be there – it isn’t safe for you NOT to be there. If people are saying things about you and the business, you need to make sure that you are part of that conversation or at least aware of it.
- our existing marketing is working very well – yes, that may be true at the moment, but it won’t always be so. You owe it to yourself to get up to speed with social media and become a sophisticated user before it’s too late.
The interesting thing is that these answers are equally appropriate for all businesses, not just those that voice them!