Industry Focus: Earning Trust On Socials As An Accountant or Financial Advisor
There’s a lot of unpleasant financial news popping up in the headlines nowadays – the threat of recession, soaring interest rates, the ever-growing cost of living… it’s all a bit doom and gloom. So now, more than ever, it is vital for accountants and financial advisors to earn trust on social media. Here are our top tips on achieving that authentically, which neatly leads us to our first piece of advice.
Always be authentic
People know when you’re being fake. Social media has trained us to pick out when someone, business or individual, is being genuine or putting on airs. That’s why it’s vital to be genuine on socials as a business. For instance, if you say you’re there to help, you must practise what you preach – freely offer advice, keep people updated on financial news, educate the audience, and more.
Brand consistency
People like consistency when it comes to brands. They don’t want to see three different logos for the same business. It’s confusing, misleading, and frustrating. The same goes for brand colours, fonts, icons, and content.
Your brand must be represented consistently across all touchpoints – that is, every instance the audience experiences or comes into contact with your brand, online and offline.
Consistency should also be applied to your visual and textual content on socials.
(A brand guidelines and style guide is incredibly useful for ensuring everyone on your team remains on brand. If you don’t have one, chat to us!)
Share high-quality content
Show that you’re a thought leader by sharing high-quality content. Socials are a great place for this. Content can be captions, articles, infographics, videos, and more!
Ideally, 50% of this content is original and produced by your business. But, without a dedicated marketing team (or agency on retainer), the time needed to create that content is hard to find. That’s why sharing others’ content is also a good idea.
The Tax Institute and ATO are always pumping out content, as are others in your industry. Resharing their content, or doing ’round up’ style posts, is a great way to add some diversity to your content or buff out your content schedule if you’re running low on ideas or time.
Build a community and nurture engagement
Managing engagement is crucial on socials, especially if you want to build trust. Properly nurturing audience-brand interaction builds a relationship between the two, which is where you’ll start to earn trust and even loyalty. So be sure to respond to comments and invite people to ask questions. You might even try running a few Q&As sessions during tax time or when something big happens – a great example of recent news to cover would be when the Federal Reserve lifted the interest rate.
There’s more than one benefit to nurturing engagement too!
Algorithms love to see engagement. Channels with lots of genuine engagement will often find themselves bumped up in ranking, meaning that their posts appear in more search results and in relevant recommendations.
Encourage user-generated content
One of the best things you can do to grow trust on socials is to share reviews and testimonials from your current clients – Facebook even has a specific tab for collecting reviews. These are great for building trust.
According to Bright Local, 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Imagine how that can work in your favour.
While we’re on the topic, encourage user-generated content. This type of content works somewhat like word of mouth without going quite so hard as a straight testimonial. These posts are essentially those about you that aren’t made by you, such as a shout-out ‘Thanks for the help’ post from a happy client.
Show the BTS
Behind the scenes content is a great way to show that you and your team are a collective of real people. It puts a face, or faces, to the name. That personal touch makes it easier for customers to trust you and adds authenticity to your channels.
Now you may initially be going ‘????’ when asked to think up ideas for BTS for your industry, so here are a few free ideas from us:
- Get to know the team
- The story of us (the company)
- Office pets (plus pet visits!)
- A day in the life
Show off your qualifications
Experience is a cherry on top when it comes to gaining trust. If you’ve been in the industry for a while, be sure to tell people that. Reveal the unfolding story of your career and business by telling the audience about changes overcome, challenges met, and achievements.
Demonstrating your experience does more than elevate your reputation. It makes you more trustworthy and shows how you can make the client’s life easier.
These tips are a great starting point for anyone in the tax or finances sectors that wants to get the most out of social media.
Have a question about these tips? Or want to talk about how we can help you build trust online? Contact us here or email info@brokat.studio.
