Social Media: can it really generate sales and business?

Social media platforms have seen enormous development and uptake over the past five years. More significantly, they offer financial advisers worthwhile sales and lead generation strategies. Through social media, advisers can target a younger audience by outlining the different products which are available.

In this article, we will explore the sales and lead generation possibilities of the different social media platforms and how financial advisers can benefit from these new generation platforms.

Is old school still appropriate?

In the past, before internet, financial advisers were in a position of power, as they were regarded as the most informed party in any given transaction.

Clients had to take financial advisers at face value and work a lot harder to get second opinions and recommendations from friends and family.

Now that the power has shifted to the client, they take longer to make purchase decisions, collect larger amounts of information online to inform those decisions, and engage with advisers much later on in the purchase cycle, if at all.

The adviser is still in the best position to advise the client how to save effectively for their retirement. It just needs to be done in a manner where the client’s needs becomes the departure point for the adviser’s sale.

Using social media

Although the appropriate information is not available in South Africa, the picture in North America and Europe looks as follows, and we can assume that it is not too different to what the South African situation is:

What is clear from this data is that LinkedIn and Twitter are the two social media sites that are mostly used by decision makers for business purposes. It stands to reason that financial advisers should take cognisance of these two channels.

Although Facebook is primarily used for personal purposes, important life events published on the site provide advisers with a great opportunity to reach out to and engage with clients appropriately. It can also be used as an effective medium to generate leads. If a client is happy with your service, they will tell their friends.

With nearly nine in ten private clients active today on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, social business is no longer optional for advisers, it is mandatory. In addition, results from a Fidelity Investments survey state that two-thirds of US private clients say they would like to use electronic media to communicate with their financial advisers.

Your selling approach?

We know that the acceptance of social media in banking and wealth management has been slow due to an industry that is worried about compliance with all the new regulations. In this context, many firms believe that compliance will fall through the cracks if their advisers are active on social media sites.

However, it is evident that social media marketing is slowly gaining acceptance in these industries and there are now several software companies offering to monitor and control posts on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

The greatest advantage for adviser is that social media sites are perfectly suited to help them build relationships, educate clients and garner referrals.

For example, instead of having to manually scan through newspaper wedding and birth announcements, today’s savvy social adviser can simply scan through social media feeds to hone in on the right signal and reach out with the right message at the right time.

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are toolsets that are an absolute must for any financial adviser. They are your eyes and ears, which for the first time ever, can be cloned. In the next article we will explore in more detail how to use these platforms.