The following post is republished from AccountingWEB, a source of accounting news, information, tips, tools, resources and insight — everything you need to help you prosper and enjoy the accounting profession.
Many people who advocate online networking do so in a generic way that can be a turn-off. They may argue that the same principles apply regardless of our business or professional activities. However it’s long been my experience that accountants are special and need to be addressed differently.
De some other online social media, I actively encourage accountants to register on LinkedIn – even if they intend doing nothing else there. In my view it’s the only online networking site where you can benefit from simply having a decent profile online.
Generally, online networking can only work if you are active and netWORK. This is also true of LinkedIn but, unlike the other sites, it is the only one that people use as a directory to search for someone like you.
This passive approach to LinkedIn may not produce as good results for those who make more active use of its facilities. But for most accountants, it’s better than nothing.
I recently caught up with Mark Perl, one of the UK’s leading LinkedIn advocates and trainers. He also understands accountants and promotes the site as the one place where we should all manage our professional reputations online.
At a bare minimum, Perl thinks all practitioners should complete a LinkedIn profile to help them be found and to optimise their search engine visibility. At its best, the site enables individuals to showcase their specific expertise to attract clients. Perl goes further and claims it is also the most effective business development and client retention resource currently available. Mark Perl and I each have detailed profiles on LinkedIn as do an increasing number of accountants in practice.
Perl comments, “When you know how to use LinkedIn well, you’ll save yourself a ton of time. You’ll walk through open doors instead of making cold calls, you’ll enhance your personal reputation, and the profile of your practice, you’ll access outstanding information and opportunities that you would previously have missed and, ultimately, you’ll increase your revenue.”
I’ve previously identified five ways that accountants can benefit simply from establishing their profile properly on LinkedIn. There are numerous other ways in which you can benefit further if you are proactive on the site. For example, Perl encourages accountants to use their LinkedIn profile and the answers section to set out their specific areas of expertise. He points out that this offers an opportunity to differentiate your firm’s particular values and virtues.
LinkedIn now has over 75 million business people as members and during March this year UK membership rose above 4 million.
For accountants who are keen to grow their practices this is a veritable goldmine of prospects. “The Advanced Search capability within LinkedIn can uncover all the business leads you’ll ever need, within your geographic location, within the specific sectors that are of interest to you, within companies of the size you prefer to approach and with the very name and job title of the decision maker you wish to engage with,” says Mark Perl.
I think he’s also right that LinkedIn is “unsurpassed” for business development. If used properly, it can be far more effective at generating leads than spammy old direct mail/email campaigns and cold-call telesales drives.
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What a joke, showing how out of touch the leaders of our profession are. If the profession wants improve recruitment and stop the bleeding of experienced CPA’s, then it needs to, excuse me, grow a set and stand up for the profession. We are under regulatory assault, with lawyers and bureaucrats, with no accounting background, attacking us day after day. Onerous rules continue to be promulgated, and CPA’s have their profession careers upended on a weekly basis- with no end in site. Where are our leaders? We need to clean house at the AICPA and our State Societies, and get rid of the people diluting our profession by admitting everyone short of grave diggers, and replace them with people focused on fighting for the CPA profession.
Maybe firms need to pay more as well…..
Well said!
Agreed 10000 billion percent with what Robert just wrote. Bureaucrats and Lawyers have taken over the accounting profession and are pushing their own agendas. AICPA is just a facade for the BIG 4 oligopoly and their master plan for world domination. Sole practitioners are being driven out of business and forced out of the profession altogether. Vast amounts of audit work are now being offshore outsourced to countries like India or turned over to ChatGPT. Sad but I fear nothing will change until there is another Enron or Worldcom or Arthur Anderson type of massive accounting failure.
I think we need to be guarded with our criticism against descending into useless snark. There are plenty of things to criticize the AICPA and their Big 4 compadres about, I don’t think this is one of them. I’ll confess though this looks a bit unserious to me, 50 something CPAs are not the target – high school kids are. They have to try something, this at least will do no harm.