Is FaceBook the Rotary Club of the early 21st century? Not yet. Maybe never. In fact, though you may find an old high school classmate from 30 years ago, and you may share stories online, you may also find that she lives five miles away from you now, and be able to have lunch. Social media is spawning all kinds of in-person meetings, as evidenced by the success of networks like Meetup.
But can social media help you professionally at this early stage of the movement?
Technology lecturer and author Carlton Collins was surprised when he first got on Facebook. “I got on four months ago expecting to find a bunch of snot-nosed kids wasting time,” he said, in a Facebook email.
“To my surprise, Facebook has had a profound impact on me both personally and professionally. I've reconnected with hundreds of lost friends and colleagues and now interact with many of them to our mutual benefit."
That’s the reaction a lot of people have when they first consider connecting with the five-year-old Facebook. And there are indeed a lot of snot-nosed kids wasting time there. But we’re beginning—beginning—to see useful applications for the profession there.
The problem with using Facebook as a marketing tool is the difficulty people will have finding you. You’d be better off placing a regular ad on Craigslist at this stage; at least you’ll get some regional targeting there.
Facebook could be a great tool for and dealing with thorny issues, but I don’t see a lot of evidence of that yet. One accounting page that boasted more than 1,000 fans had a very active wall with lots of questions, but few answers.
Individual networking seems to be the most prevalent use of Facebook by the profession at this early stage, like Collins found. Organizations, too, are jumping on the bandwagon: You can find Facebook pages launched by, for example, the AICPA and state CPA societies.
But all of these people and organizations already have Web sites. Why Facebook?
Think of social media as another way to have a contact with a client, said CPA Brian Tankersley in a Facebook e-mail, who teaches with the K2E team and consults. Just as many professionals use newsletters to have an extra "touch" from you to clients, Facebook, Twitter, etc. can help you keep up on people and friends from anywhere.
Ah yes. Twitter. Twitter, at first blush, would seem less useful for the profession than Facebook. How do you answer a client’s question about depreciation in 140 characters?
Still, there are CPAs using Twitter. I found one who had almost 5,000 followers, but the tweets that I saw consisted mostly of inspirational messages and ads for the CPA’s services. Other CPAs use Twitter more effectively, like drbobspencer, who, in a recent tweet, estimated that 10 percent of CPAs in his seminars use Facebook, and 5 percent or less tweet; all, though, were looking at the business applications of social media.
Chad Bordeaux, a CPA in Lake Wylie, SC, has actually picked up some clients on Twitter. “For the most part, they followed me as a result of me following them,” he said in an e-mail. “I searched out “Tweeps” in my local area, followed the ones that were of interest to me, and most followed me back.”
Brian Austin, Director of PR at SpeedTax, had to lay some groundwork, but his company now has an effective presence on Twitter. He says he started following CPAs on Twitter, who then followed him back. Then he started pushing out messages around the company's core space (sales tax), and posted announcements of webinars, general news about sales tax changes, proposed changes by state, and announcements about their participation in CPA-related conferences and shows.
More significantly, the company created a SpeedTax blog that is essentially a landing page for Twitter. Once people hit the blog, they're on the SpeedTax website, where there's a lot of information directed at CPAs, mostly educational.
At this point, Twitter may be best used by professionals to network with other professionals – not necessarily to update clients on the mundane details of your day, because everyone has too much to read already, but to alert other pros to conference opportunities, interesting reading, and tools for the practice. It may be possible to briefly answer questions from prospective clients and snag new business that way, but with the current fragmented state of Twitter, don’t bank on it. Yet.
The real issue, says Tankersley, is automatically filtering and categorizing your output so that the information is organized when you consume it. Google Reader is a good way to do this.
Tankersley has found professional value in Twitter et al. “I find that I get a lot of good information from Facebook, Twitter, etc. on what's going on in the industry,” he said, in a Facebook email.
Employees at Intuit monitor their customers’ voices on Twitter, and the company also uses Twitter to keep accounting professionals in the loop. The company is extraordinarily active on social media in general. It hosts the Intuit Academy page on Facebook to keep professionals in touch with company and industry events. Intuit recently held the 2009 Growth and Productivity Virtual Conference (offering fee CPE credit), and regularly posts podcasts designed to help accountants… “…better serve their clients through education and best practices.”
Intuit is also looking at LinkedIn to see how it can partner there. LinkedIn is the serious, studious citizen of the social media world. No flashy graphics, no pictures of frat parties, no “25 Things About Me” quizzes. Just professional information.
You can create something of an expanded resume there, including written recommendations from fellow LinkedIn users, and exchange messages with others. Like Facebook, LinkedIn lets you set up a network of friends and associates and create or join groups of like-minded individuals. It recommends people you may want to add to your network, and let people know what kind of networking you’re interested in.
Companies can set up pages here, like Intuit (along with hundreds of its employees) and the AICPA, and CPAs are using it. Run a search for “CPA,” and you get almost 100,000 hits. While professionals are still figuring out how to use LinkedIn, some have found applications, like the group started for “emerging CPAs” by the Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs.
Me Too
Though Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are currently the Big Three of social media, others are in the process of developing, like Plaxo. Keep your history with technology in mind. We’re still at very primitive stages with these services, and someone may come up a better way to do it.
Right now, we’re kind of at the “Here We All Are” stage of social media. We’re pretty good at using it personally, and we’re working on the professional applications. Social media is free marketing, and while you may not be sure why you’re using it, your clients—and potential clients—will wonder why you’re not.
And until Facebook can figure out how to assemble and run a fish taco booth for a Rotary fundraiser, in-person groups won’t be extinct. There’ll probably be even more of them—personal and professional—thanks to social media.
