In the professional services space, it's a mistake if you think the 140-character tweet is what it takes to make you a powerful authority who will draw clients, referral sources, and opinion leaders. For a professional service firm, at the very foundation of any effective social media strategy is creating quality content and publishing it on your website and more widely.

Momentary social media interest may excite some interest among journalists, and some individuals who will access professional services for their personal needs, but have less impact among substantial business consumers.

Little of your expertise, insights, services, and appeal can be showcased in a twenty-odd word tweet or the first couple of sentences of search engine results.

Quality website content is interesting and magnetic. It will draw the right people in to your practice as leads, opportunities, and prospective clients.

What qualifies ?

• substantive material
• thoughtful analysis
• opinion pieces
• trend watch and analysis
• useful distillations of your wisdom
• war stories about problems you've solved
• descriptions of how you help
• interesting profiles of your best and most connected experts
• helpful general guides and advice
• success stories
• checklists and tips
• directories of useful resources/information sources
• your involvement in making the news.

Not only will your website earn its keep through more and better content, but the social media you do engage will be more effective too.

When folk read your tweets, they'll find there's much more to you than those limited-character utterances. Your twenty words will lead them to a rich vein of interest - a virtual pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Before you tweet or blog, upload rich content to your website.

And the best news is that we observe that in the professional services world, your published work product is much more powerful than suspect ad-words or expensive advertising.

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© Trey Ryder

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