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Business can be generated from social media and we know that there have been a lot of articles written and a lot of discussions regarding social media. We would just like to ask a couple of questions before you dismiss yet another article on this topic. Is your business blocking Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networking sites? By doing this are you also preventing your company from using them to promote your company? Do you as a business owner understand these technologies?

It might be an error to create policies preventing access to these sites without fully understanding them. The overwhelming reasons for taking the preventative measures tend to be the lack of knowledge or understanding of them; they are not professional, users don’t communicate correctly and form bad habits, there are potential legal issues around it or they are a waste of valuable productive time. This article will hopefully give you a little better understanding of social media sites and some ideas on how you might use them for your business.

One of the best things you can do to start developing your understanding, is to gather a core group of your employees that you would consider the experts on these sites. In our firm we brought a group of five individuals together and brainstormed on how we could use the sites and what sites we might utilize. We focused in on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each one of these ended up having a distinctively different scope of use while sharing a similar underlying principal. That principal was connecting and sharing our firm with more people. Our scope of use for each is as follows:

  • Facebook Fan Page: Connecting to college recruits, clients and referral sources to help share our culture and our people as well as share news and articles that we have written.
  • LinkedIn: Connecting professionally with each of our clients, contacts and potential clients as well as sharing news and articles that we feel are of some value to those we have connected.
  • Twitter: Connecting our followers to news, articles and updates about our firm, the economy, the industries we specialize in and more.

In addition to the setup of our firm sites, we also developed a training session for all of our staff to educate them on a number of things. We looked at our firm’s Social Media policy, set our expectations on their use of the site for personal use while on the clock, trained users on how they might use LinkedIn to connect to professionals and clients and how to connect to the firm’s profile, and showed them the firm’s Facebook Fan Page and the Twitter page.

You can always find us online along with all our latest news and articles at https://www.greenwaltcpas.com but also be sure to look us up on these social media sites:

We will provide some further information and guidance on these topics in future articles, but in the meantime, feel free to reach out to us if you have any additional questions or comments. If you would like to discuss what might work effectively in your organization, please me.