There is growing amount of social media available for the business professional. Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and a plethora of other tools all promise an easy and cheap vehicle for delivering “marketing” to an eager audience.

But while such tools have a clear application and benefit to consumer organisations, the position to professionals such as accountants and lawyers remains unclear. All too often, marketers exhort professionals to ‘get involved’ with marketing through social media channels without necessarily giving their colleagues the information required to make an informed decision. Although one of the key strengths of social media platforms is the apparently low cost and ease to get started, there are significant ‘hidden’ costs and reputational risks.

Here are a number of key factors to consider when deciding on whether or not professionals should become involved in social media activities:

1. People only want to read things that are valuable to them

Content needs to be well thought out and useful, which is time consuming. If a relatively senior professional who bills, say, £250 per hour spends on average an hour putting together a piece of content, and does 20 updates a month, then the cost of that activity is £5000. At a large law firm, multiplying that by the number of partners being asked to be involved means the maths begins to get a bit scary. Developing a clear system of measurement to assess leads generated against cost incurred is a good idea.

2. People only want to read things that are valuable to them

A professional’s value lies in his or her intellectual capital, rather than a physical product. In order to position themselves as an expert that an audience wants to hear from regularly, the professional must ‘give away’ elements of their intellectual capital – traditionally clients pay well for access to this information. Professionals face a significant challenge in providing just enough information to keep an audience interested, but leaving enough unsaid that a prospect will contact them for fee-generating advice.

3. It’s hard to retract something written

Anything published live on any website potentially exists forever, even if it’s changed afterwards. Sites like the Wayback project take snapshots of the whole web to preserve for any future researcher. Anything deleted from sites such as Twitter will disappear from a user’s home page, but remain searchable in the public domain. The danger of any social media is that it’s very easy to post something incorrect which could have a future legal or reputational ramification. This is a particularly serious risk for professionals, where a tarnished reputation can mean instant loss of fee income, not to mention legal or regulatory action.

While it’s clear there are risks involved in mindlessly becoming involved in social media activities, a well thought out digital strategy involving professionals who understand the implications of their involvement will be beneficial. It is important for professionals to realise that social media is not a ‘silver bullet’ and that any activity undertaken in this space needs to integrate with and reinforce existing or planned marketing campaigns. With a bit of thought, social media can quickly become a valuable additional channel through which to communicate, and content developed for social media channels can often be used across other platforms – minimising costs and maximising potential returns.

Robin Stephens is a director at VutureGroup.