Between clients and prospects, industry peers and centres of influence, most financial advisors already have a built-in community around their practices.
“Social networks offer an effective way to strengthen that community and build engagement,” says Jay Palter, chief engagement officer with Jay Palter Social Advisory in Calgary. By fostering an engaged online community, you can strengthen your client retention and increase referrals.
“What a lot of people misunderstand about social media and social networking is that they think they’re looking for new prospects all the time, and that’s the primary way to be measuring their success,” Palter says. “But the fact is that all of [your] clients who are satisfied and happy with the service they’re being provided with have a network of people who are one step away from potentially being a client.”
The challenge, then, is to build engagement with those online connections you already have.
Here are four ways to build engagement online:
1. Practise first with a personal account
If you are new to social media, Palter suggests you start by creating a personal account before launching an account for your business.
With a personal (and private) account on Facebook or an account on Twitter that uses an alias, you can familiarize yourself with the way people communicate online, and best practices for interacting with others.
Once you get the hang of it, Palter says, “it becomes much easier to figure out how to incorporate social networking and those kinds of digital technology into your business life.”
2. Go mobile, save time
You can minimize the time you spend online by using your mobile device in an effective way, Palter says. For example, you can squeeze in time for social media while you’re in between meetings or away from your desk by using mobile applications.
“The irony of social networking is that people look at it and say that it requires them to add time onto their already busy schedule,” Palter says. “But, as you become better at online social networking, you can create more connections and more interaction and have more engaged relationships with less time invested.”
3. Leverage your support team
You don’t have to do everything yourself. You can use your administrative team or hire a third-party company to create or find content worth sharing.
4. Use tools to share consistently
There are many third-party applications that allow you to schedule and manage content that you’ll be sharing in social networks. Buffer, for example, is an app that allows you to queue content to be published at a later time or date.
“The beauty of that,” Palter says, “is that you can sit down and come up with 10 interesting things you want to share in the following week, and then put them into your Buffer queue, and Buffer will take care of distributing them to your network according to a pre-set schedule.”
Your objective should be to produce helpful content to stay visible and top-of-mind among your clients. Personal finance, economics, productivity and lifestyle topics will all likely be relevant to your audience on some level, Palter says.
“Social networking is not a marketing strategy,” he says. “It’s a communication and engagement strategy.”