Take a fresh approach to your firm’s website

If challenged to name your top ten favourite websites, it’s likely that Google, Amazon, the BBC, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes or OneNewsPage would feature highly on your list.  OK, maybe it’s a little too early for OneNewsPage!

It’s a fair bet that none of your chosen sites would belong to an accountancy practice.

It’s not that most of the larger accounting firms’ sites are anything less than professional.  Almost without exception, they are competently put together and efficiently laid out.  In short, they do their job well enough. However, most lack any sort of ‘wow factor’.

Perhaps this is rightly so.  A conservative approach is appropriate for established financial and business services firms that have to sell their services based on their experience, probity and reliability.

Being conservative therefore is forgivable.  But having information that is stale or out of date is much less so.

With every financial services organization having to respond to a raft of new regulations and ever-changing marketplaces, there’s no excuse for not keeping your firm’s website fresh, especially the home page and news pages.  Fresh content will keep returning users interested and informed.

A great opportunity to create regular fresh content – delivered in an appealing and up-to-date manner – is via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter which you can link to your site and to your firm’s blogs.

Blogs of course have been around a while.  Most of the larger accountancy firms have been publishing them for a good few years.  Usually they allot a roster of different staff who blog on topics within their area of expertise.

Without naming or shaming, it’s clear that many of these blogs were started in a moment of enthusiasm but with little forethought about how they would be maintained.  Initially they were regularly updated.  But over time, quite a few are less frequently updated and seem a bit tired.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal some 95% of bloggers have abandoned their blogs in favour of Twitter and Facebook, which demand less effort.

If your firm is committed to blogs (and let’s face it, deeply profound comment can rarely be delivered in 140 characters) right now is a genuine opportunity to win larger audiences for your firm’s blogs as your competition fades.

A key part of any blog’s success is getting the right tone of voice.  For a corporate blog this is more of a challenge than for a personal one.  Corporate bloggers have to be conscious of not offending clients, staff or infringing libels laws.  All these constraints can make the language more stilted and the blog less readable.

Good blog language must be natural, conversational, not jargon-ridden or too technical. A good blog entry should be shortish, ideally fewer than 400 words, and link to other blogs and places where users can find out more.

But if you look at the number of comments posted under most of the big firm’s blog entries, these are generally either ‘0 comments’ or in their 1s and 2s. In short, these bloggers are talking mostly to themselves.

The fault might not only lie with the writing style and dry content. Blogs, like any content on the Web, have to be actively promoted. Ensuring they feature unique content and have a clear layout and navigation structure goes a long way for site visitors and search engines to find relevant blog entries. These measures also encourage other authoritative industry sources to cite your blog as a reference – the resultant links are an important part of any search engine optimization efforts for increasing visibility and traffic to your blog.

It doesn’t matter if the blog is updated only a few times a month, as long as there is consistency in how frequently a new blog entry appears.  Further, there’s a good argument for only blogging when the blogger has something they really want to say, and isn’t going through the motions to please their boss.

And to the more thorny issue of how to get the best out of Twitter and Facebook.  These days, it’s not overstating it to say that these two social networking sites are established and important communication channels, perhaps as important as the firm’s official channels.

Don’t forget that today’s highly IT literate younger staffers have grown up with Facebook at university and each has built their own online communities.  You might rue it, but younger staff are much more likely to talk on Facebook about live work issues rather than penning a memo to their manager.

Therefore, even to address your own staff, you are going to have to have some sort of policy about how to embrace Twitter and Facebook in order to keep in with the conversation.

Fortunately, getting to know Twitter and Facebook is not difficult. If your firm is considering setting up a corporate Twitter or Facebook account, delegate the task to people who can write succinctly and who are not too pushy or ‘corporate’ in their language.  This strikes the wrong tone and looks ill at ease and out of place on social networks.

A very good example of a successful corporate presence is @LDN on Twitter.  This person or people tweets about 20 or 30 or so times a day about things to do or see in London, sharing interesting or fun facts, almost always attaching a link to a website or photograph.  In short, it is useful and entertaining, with a personality and real tone of voice.

If @LDN can get this right, there’s absolutely no reason why your firm can’t either.  And remember, it’s not forgivable to let your site be out of date and stale.  There are plenty of opportunities to keep it fresh, readable and plugged in.

Top Tips for Revamping your Website

• Check when your site last had a major redesign. Maybe one is long overdue

• Communicate any major changes in advance to users.  Keep on communicating and don’t assume everyone has got the picture from a single communiqué

• Form focus groups of frequent users to get their views and opinions on intended site alternations

• Make sure you regularly update the home page and news pages with fresh content

• Join Twitter and Facebook and use them properly

• Revisit your blogs policy.  Right now there is an opportunity to relaunch them and steal some market share as others’ interest fade

• Make sure your blogs are well linked to others of quality and appeal, and that your copy is key word checked and properly tagged

 By Neil Boom
http://www.onenewspage.com/