Social Media - the new way to generate sales leads and business
Social media has taken the world by storm and will have a significant impact on the insurance industry. It provides novel conversation platforms, which offer value if observed, explored and used fearlessly with conversation value in mind.
Social media sites take many forms including blogs, message boards, social networks, social bookmarking, tagging and news, podcast portals and collective intelligence, to name a few.
The world of the world wide web and social media
The Before Dawn era of the web spanned from 1969 until 1993. Compuserve was established in 1969, becoming the first major internet service provider using dial-up technology. The first e-mail was delivered in 1971 and Sir Tim Berners-Lee began work at CERN in 1989 on what would eventually become the World Wide Web, which was selflessly donated by CERN to the world in 1993.
As with most revolutionary innovations, the web and its social uses were not an overnight success. Between 1994 and 2004, the Dawning era, the web was scorned at with headlines and articles such as: The Internet? Bah! Hype Alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and never will be, nirvana, which appeared in Newsweek in 1995.
In 2000, the dot.com bubble burst and the future of online business seemed bleak as the millennium turned.
Then in 2001, Apple Computers started selling the iPod. In 2003, MySpace and LinkedIn were launched, Apple introduced the iTunes music service and there were more than three billion web pages. The course of social media success became a certainty as young minds drove its adoption.
During the After Dawn era, from 2005 till today, things became hectic in the world of social media. In 2005, Facebook was launched as a site for high school students and by 2009, it was ranked as the most-used social media network worldwide with more than 200 million users. By 2006, Google had indexed more than 25 billion web pages and were receiving more than 400 million queries per day.
In 2010, there were an estimated 1.97 billion internet users and Apple launched the iPad tablet computer. By 2013, Facebook had 1.11 billion users, Apple’s customers had downloaded over 50 billion apps and LinkedIn had 225 million users.
Embracing mobile economic growth
The tremendous growth of the online world and social media is as important for the developing world as it is for developed countries.
In the US alone, the new economy is creating 25% of new job opportunities, digital jobs created by SME’s and solopreneurs. Africa’s digital gap too is closing fast. Children in Rwanda are going to school with iPads instead of textbooks. Kenya is the world leader in mobile payments and 4G broadband services are reaching African countries before much of Europe.
As of 2013, online spending on e-services and e-products such as e-books and mobile apps topped $100 billion. Coca Cola’s strategy on doubling its business by 2020 is based solely on mobile marketing and digital content engagement. It is predicted that online consulting will grow by 83% over the next five years. It is apparent that this new economy holds tremendous opportunities for entrepreneurs as they now have a unique platform to tap in local and global markets to attract new customers.
The important question is: how to navigate in this new economy. We know that financial advisers using social media fall roughly into two categories. The average successful adviser is in his or her late 40’s to early 60’s and are probably not particularly adept at using social media. Then there is the new inflow of advisers who have grown up with social media and use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn on a regular basis.
In the next article we will take a closer look at how financial advisers and brokers can use social media to benefit their practices and the way they do business.
