You’ve written a social media plan before. Maybe it had a goal, an audience, a content mix and a calendar. It looked good for three weeks. Then the June returns arrived, nobody posted, and the plan went back in the folder.
That’s the usual life of a social media plan at an accounting firm. The plan never said who would do the work, or when.
So this plan is different. It fits on one page, and most of its decisions are about people and time.
Why most plans die in month two
The social media plan templates you find online are written for a marketing team. They assume someone owns the channel, has hours to spare and doesn’t bill by the quarter hour.
Your firm has none of that. You have partners who bill, dossier managers who are stretched, and a few peaks a year when nothing else gets done. Whoever has the idea in January is rarely the person with time in May.
The basics of a plan (audience, channels, goals) are covered in our general guide to building a social media plan. This post covers what that guide can’t: the decisions that decide whether the plan survives an accounting calendar. If you still need the case for posting at all, start with why social media marketing matters for accounting firms.
There are five, and they take about an hour to make.
Step 1: pick one goal and one platform (LinkedIn)
Most accounting firms want three things from social media at once: to look credible to the clients they already have, to attract new hires, and to get the partners known beyond their own network. All three are fine. You can’t serve all three well in month one.
Rank them, then pick one:
- Client validation. A prospect hears your name at a networking event and checks you out. They should find a firm that looks active and competent.
- Hiring. Candidates look at your page before they apply. Showing the team, the work culture and the people they’d work with does the job.
- Partner visibility. Your partners become the name people think of when they need an accountant in your region.
For the platform, the answer for a firm in Belgium or the Netherlands is LinkedIn. It’s where your clients, referrers and future hires already are. We compare the options in our post on the best platforms for accounting firms, so we won’t repeat that here. For a look at how firms across Belgium use it, see 9 Belgian accounting firms on LinkedIn.
What about Instagram or Facebook? Add them later, once the LinkedIn rhythm has survived a busy season. A second platform on top of an unkept first one just doubles the gap.
Step 2: name who speaks for the firm
This is the step most plans skip, and it’s the one that matters most.
Pick one or two partners as the voices of the firm. Put their names in the plan. Your company page (set it up first with our guide to optimising your LinkedIn page) supports them: it carries the firm’s updates, vacancies and team news, and it gives the partners’ posts somewhere to point.
At Carbofisc, the owner’s personal profile became a strong visibility driver on LinkedIn, in a firm whose social media goal is recruiting and building a fanbase. At Godderis Accountancy in Roeselare, posts can go out under the owners’ own profiles, Francky’s and Xander’s. Both firms put named people in front of the page.
Once the voices are named, the next question is who does the typing. Split the work into two roles, because they don’t need to be the same person:
- Assign a writer. This can be the partner, a colleague with a feel for words, or an outside coach. Someone has a draft ready every week. Our coaching for accountants is one way to fill this role.
- Assign an approver. This is the partner whose name is on the post. They read it, change what they’d never say, and approve it.
Willow’s own model works this way: an assistant drafts, a coach checks, and whoever runs the page reviews and approves, in close to an hour a week. That’s our model, not a universal number, but it shows how little time the approver role needs when someone else carries the drafting.
Write one more thing into this step: the off-limits list.
- No client names, unless the client has agreed in writing to that specific post.
- No figures or details from a file.
- No pending matters of any kind.
- No outcome claims such as "we saved this client 30%."
In the Netherlands, the NBA’s VGBA sets a confidentiality duty (article 16) with an exception for written consent for a specific, recorded purpose. In Belgium, the ITAA’s deontology requires strict professional secrecy, so check with the ITAA before naming a client. We haven’t found a rule that deals with social media specifically in either country, so ask your institute if you’re unsure. Keep the list short and make sure everyone has read it.
Step 3: choose three content themes, not twenty ideas
A blank page every Monday is what kills the weekly habit. Three themes remove it.
Pick three things your partners can speak about without preparation, and write them down. For a mid-sized Belgian firm, that might be:
- What changed for clients. A new rule, a deadline, a deduction that’s gone or arrived. This shows you read the details so clients don’t have to.
- How the firm works. The team, a new hire, the office, a milestone. This is the hiring theme.
- A partner’s view. One opinion on something the partner sees repeatedly in their practice. This is where the voice comes from.
Your three might be different. A firm focused on SME founders may swap in "mistakes we see in the first year." What matters is that there are three, they’re written on the page, and each one has an owner.
How to turn a theme into a finished post is a separate skill. Our guide to creating a post from a social media plan takes it from here.
Step 4: set a rhythm you can keep in busy season
Here’s the part where a firm’s plan stops looking like a marketing plan.
Set a floor: one post a week, every week, instead of four in a good week and none for a month.
The reason is in the numbers. In our LinkedIn consistency report, we looked at 488 LinkedIn company pages over 12 months and 43,738 posts. These are B2B company pages in general, not only accountants, but the pattern is clear. Pages that posted in 50 to 79% of weeks, instead of 25 to 49%, more than doubled their results per post. Pages that posted in bursts, even with up to 34% more content overall, performed up to 9x worse on engagement than pages with weekly consistency.
Posting twice a week did better still: about 59% more impressions per year than posting once. But that comes after you’ve managed the first one. Keep the weekly slot first and add a second post later.
Then write a busy-season version of the rhythm into the plan:
- Mark your own peaks. Most firms have two or three. In Belgium, private returns land in late June and July, and complex returns and companies in October. In the Netherlands, the income tax return around 1 May and the quarterly btw returns set the pace. Yours depend on your client mix.
- Set a minimum for those weeks. One short post is enough: a team photo, a reminder of a deadline, a vacancy.
- Pre-write before the peak. Write four or five posts in the quiet week before. Schedule them. Then the peak can’t break the chain.
None of this needs a calendar grid or a tool to start. A recurring 45-minute slot in the writer’s diary, same day every week, does more than any scheduling software.
Step 5: decide what you’ll measure, then review monthly
Pick three or four numbers. No more.
- Posts published, against the weekly floor.
- Impressions per post, to see if what you say reaches anyone.
- Profile visits and followers, for the partners and the firm page.
- One number tied to your goal: applications that mention LinkedIn if the goal is hiring, or first conversations that start with "I saw your post" if it’s clients.
Then put a 20-minute review in the diary on the same day each month. Ask three questions: what do we keep, what do we drop, what do we change? Write the answers on the plan and move on.
That’s the whole measurement system. Three numbers you look at every month are worth more than fifteen you don’t.
The plan on one page
Copy this, fill it in, and put it where the partners can see it.
- Goal (pick one): client validation, hiring, or partner visibility.
- Platform: LinkedIn.
- Voices: partner 1 and partner 2 (names).
- Writer: name.
- Approver: name.
- Off-limits: client names, figures from files, pending matters, outcome claims.
- Three themes: 1, 2, 3.
- Weekly slot: day and time.
- Busy-season minimum: one post a week, pre-written. Our peaks: month, month.
- Monthly review: date, 20 minutes: keep, drop, change.
If you can fill in every line except the writer, you’ve found the real gap, and it’s a common one. That’s the part Willow runs. Willow’s assistant drafts the posts from a profile of your firm, a coach checks them, you approve, and the weekly slot stops depending on who has time. At Acs Accountants, with ten offices, content used to go live only when there was time.
This week, fill in the first three lines of the plan and book the weekly slot.