I received a call today from St. Louis Community College. They've asked me to present at a private breakfast for accountants in St. Louis. It's next Thursday.
I'll be presenting on how to leverage social media to grow your business as an independent professional-- a sort of "What is Twitter" or "How do I get a website?" type of presentation about the basics, but I want to make sure it provides real value, as this is a professional community in St. Louis for which I have a lot of respect and admiration. It will be tough to skim it down to 1 hour and accomplish that goal, but I certainly will try. I really enjoy speaking and educating about online marketing any chance I get.
From the info they sent me:
This series of breakfast lectures is designed to assist CPAs who are in private practice as well as those in corporate staff positions. The lectures will help CPAs achieve their required Continuing Professional (CPE) units. The topics will be relative to the interest and needs of CPAs and will be "taught by recognized experts."
-- Posted from my iPhone
Erin,
ReplyDeleteI think the one point to drive home for your presentation is the key of inbound marketing using linkedin, Twitter and Facebook vs. the traditional outbound methods – cold calling, direct mail, etc. As a previous IT manager, I was bombarded with calls, emails and direct mail, literally hundreds per day which I never responded to.
While I am also new to social media, I can say that in the few weeks that we have been using these tools, many opportunities have come up that would have never been possible through the traditional methods of marketing. The reach and possibilities with these tools cannot be disputed. Most people that I discuss this with still do not seem to grasp the concept, however. Hopefully you can make them understand. Here are the basics of what I would recommend if I were starting today:
Find a good CMS system: If you can’t update content and optimize your site, you DOA.
Set up a LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook account.
Link your Twitter account to Facebook so all of the updates will populate to Twitter as well.
Follow quality Twitter users in your industry.
Sign up for Facebook advertising: Use the cost per click model. It is currently very cheap and at this point most people are not clicking on the ads. This will create free advertising for all of the impressions that you receive, and there will be a lot. For the clicks that you do receive, they are high quality leads due to the great targeting that Facebook provides. This blows away Adwords IMO and is more cost effective. And don’t forget to buy Facebook stock if they ever go public, because this will be much bigger than people realize! Please take a look at what I have set up and let me know if you have any reccomendations. Thanks.
www.ystreet.com
www.facebook.com/ystreet
www.twitter.com/ystreet_jobs
I didn't recommend Facebook advertising to the CPA group. I sort of felt (assumed) the user demographics of Facebook do not match their target demographic as well as Twitter, but I know that Facebook is getting older with time.
ReplyDeleteI also haven't seen much out there about the effectiveness of Facebook advertising for small businesses. I'll dig into that.
Thank you for the comment!