Eric Majchrzak can't stop tweeting. Or Facebooking. Or getting LinkedIn.

The marketing manager for Buffalo-based Freed Maxick & Battaglia CPAs PC is one of the few local accounting professionals who "lives and breathes" social-media tools every day as part of the firm's comprehensive marketing strategy. He prefers Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, which he says allow the firm to recruit, network and develop opportunities to boost business relationships.

"As a marketer, I know people who just like to see media in a box," said Majchrzak, who launched the firm's Twitter account in June. "But with (social media), we can communicate with employees, it gets us new employees and new business, and it brands us as a progressive firm."

Freed Maxick, the largest CPA firm in Buffalo, embraces social media tools in a way that no other local accounting firm currently does. A quick Web search of the top Buffalo accounting companies shows that most firms have created LinkedIn pages, while just a few have Facebook or Twitter accounts. None of the locally-based firms appear to operate a YouTube channel to put out advertisements or commercials.

Nationwide, a "handful of firms" use social media consistently as a recruiting and marketing technique, said Katie Tolin, a director for the Association for Accounting Marketing.

The recession is in part driving some of the early interest, because social media is free and traditional marketing tools - print advertisements, radio commercials, sponsorships - are not, Tolin said. But some firms aren't sure how much time or energy to spend on social media or how to make it profitable for the firm, she said.

They also wonder if clients will care.

"We're really struggling with how you turn it into something valuable for clients or perspective clients," said Tolin, a marketing director in Ohio. "I think it's a great fit for our industry, but we're in the very beginning stages of figuring it out."

Freed Maxick's LinkedIn page contains a detailed profile of the firm and links to more than 40 current employees' personal LinkedIn pages. Its Facebook page includes posts about the firm's activities and cultural identity, giving some sense of what it's like to work at Freed Maxick for an audience that includes college students who may be interested in working there. And its Twitter page imparts firm news and provides Internet links to industry documents.

Many of the posts redirect readers back to the firm's Web site, which is exactly what Majchrzak wants to accomplish. He said Web-site traffic has increased 35 percent to 40 percent every year since 2004, the year the firm built its LinkedIn page. But he declined to give specific figures.

"This is definitely working for the firm," Majchrzak said. "You can't just dabble in it. You have to live it and breathe it."

That's one reason some CPA firms say they hesitate to get involved with social media. Eileen Connor-Costilow, human-resources director at Lumsden & McCormick LLP, said the firm is "seriously considering" whether it should establish LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

"It is a huge time investment," said Connor-Costilow, who met with the firm's partners this month to discuss social-media options. "Even doing research to understand where we're at with learning (about social media), I could spend the whole afternoon. It becomes ‘Who manages this internally? How do we make sure the messages are timely?' I do not want to see us conspicuous by absence."

Likewise, Laura Del Monte, director of marketing and client services at Lougen Valenti Bookbinder & Weintraub LLP in Amherst, is trying to do figure out how to capitalize on social media. She created an official LinkedIn page for the firm last month, but she's still learning if, and how, other social-media resources would benefit the firm - both money-wise and relationship-wise.

KPMG LLP, one of the Big Four accounting firms in the United States, set up a Twitter account this month as a recruiting tool. The firm, which has a Buffalo office, also operates a YouTube channel that features different KPMG-focused commercials. It has not, however, created a Facebook page for recruiting purposes.

"We are being cautious in our approach to Facebook, because people can post a lot of information back and forth," said Megan Marco, KPMG's marketing director for campus recruitment. She said the firm may establish a LinkedIn page to help recruit recently graduated accountants.

However far ahead of the social-media curve Freed Maxick may be, it could soon see some competition. Brock Schechter & Polakoff in Buffalo just added a Twitter account to its online presence, which already includes LinkedIn and Facebook, human-resources manager Caroline Szydlo said.

Like Freed Maxick, Brock Schechter still uses traditional marketing methods such as print ads, but it also plans to regularly use social media as a branding technique, Szydlo said.

"In the past year, all of this media has really exploded," she said. "If you're going to use it, you have to put time and energy into it. One of the worst things you can do is start a Facebook page and then let months and months go by without updating it."