Accountants are making increasing use of social media, with adoption rates rising significantly over the past three years and more than eight in ten accountants now making regular use of social media sites, according to research from Wolters Kluwer (WK)
The annual WK Social Media Survey, which sampled the views of 1,300 accountants, found that 83% of respondents use social media sites for professional and/or personal use, up 8% on the previous year. This compares with just 69% when the research was first conducted three years ago.
Accountants are also visiting social media sites more often. This year a third (33%) said they visit several times a day compared to 19% in 2011, and another third visit at least once a day.
Usage rates are highest amongst younger accountants, with the survey finding 100% adoption in the under-30 age bracket and 94% for those under 40. Just over half (55%) of accountants aged over 60 also use social media.
Among those that do not use social media at all, the largest group (58%) simply say they are not interested, while 33% fail to see any benefit.
Only one in ten of respondents said they did not know how social media worked, down from 18% in 2011 to 11% today.
There has been a slight shift in the proportion of respondents identifying themselves as ‘listeners’ rather than ‘contributors’ to the social media world, which now stands at 76:24 rather than 80:20. This suggests more accountants are using social media as a promotional platform rather than simply a way of gathering intelligence and information from others.
While LinkedIn is still rated as the most important website for professional use, only 27% of respondents say they use the networking site to build their commercial operations and develop new business leads.
Twitter usage is up slightly among accountants in 2014, with 50% of respondents using it in their social or business lives and over a quarter (26%) for business alone. Half of Twitter users (53%) say they have more than 100 followers, while over a quarter (28%) have more than 400 followers.
Although 80% of the survey respondents use Facebook, just 18% of them do so for professional reasons and only 3% maintain an account solely for business purposes. While weblogs usage has nudged up slightly, over three-quarters (78%) of respondents do not use blogs at all.
Wolters Kluwer UK Social Media Survey 2014: How accountants are using social media for marketing and promotion can be downloaded from https://www.cch.co.uk/content/wolters-kluwer-social-media-survey-2014.
Accountancy Live is published by Wolters Kluwer UK Ltd.
