How Prospects Check You Out: The Decisive Rise of Social Media

How do buyers check out a professional services firm before purchasing? For ages, the conventional wisdom held steady: references and referrals reigned supreme. But the ready availability of information online has changed the game.

We recently wanted to see how buyers were really learning about providers today…and see if the conventional wisdom still held true. If not, that would mean many professional services were focusing on the wrong marketing priorities — a critical insight for firms looking to build visibility and grow.

The Hinge Research Institute surveyed 1,028 professional services buyers to discover the answers. These buyers purchased services including accounting and finance, marketing and communications, legal, technology, management consulting, and architecture, engineering, and construction.

Our findings? Buyers are checking out providers in some surprising new ways — and many sellers will need to realign their priorities to keep up.

The new age of social media

The top sources of information for buyers were digital: provider websites and Google searches. That’s not necessarily a shock. But the decisive rise of social media stood out:

• 60% of the buyers surveyed turned to social media to evaluate sellers
• In comparison, 55% of buyers spoke with provided references

That’s right. Social media has eclipsed provided references. Yet many professional services providers invest comparably little energy in their social media efforts.

The reference isn’t dead, of course, and isn’t likely to grow irrelevant anytime soon. But firms focusing chiefly on references are missing the bigger picture and missing opportunities. It’s not enough to get a good reference anymore — your expertise needs to be visible online.

Of course, it’s also not enough to know that you need to use social media. Where should you concentrate your efforts? Which social media platforms will represent the best use of your time, and which ones matter less in your marketplace?

You’ll want to take a close look at these questions when you embark on a social media strategy, but our study paints a compelling picture of what works and what doesn’t in the professional services marketplace.

Connections are key

Among respondents who used social media to check out sellers, a whopping 70% used LinkedIn. This makes sense for several reasons.

The professional focus of LinkedIn makes it a natural space for professional information gathering. What’s more, it’s a complex ecosystem of data, offering insight on a provider, the firm’s individual team members, their participation in industry Groups, and more. It also gives buyers an easy way to get in touch with colleagues and other contacts that have experience with a seller.

This density and focus of information explains why LinkedIn is so far ahead of the rest of the pack. Only 5% of respondents used Twitter, and 25% used other platforms like Facebook or Google+.

For sellers looking to understand how buyers evaluate them, the message is clear. You need a thoughtfully diversified strategy, but you don’t need to use a lot of different platforms for the sake of using a lot of different platforms. Find out where buyers are looking — and make sure you’re there. Today, buyers are looking at much more than references. Increasingly, they’re heading to LinkedIn.