One social media post on its own is unlikely to bring in a new client, but having an active social media presence may lead to business growth, suggested a panel of marketing professionals at the fifth annual Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit in Toronto on Tuesday.

“It’s not about making the sale by social media, it’s about showing this person who you are, strengthening that bond and making them more comfortable and more willing to invest with you,” said Shawna Dennis, director of marketing and communications, advisory services, with Manulife Financial Corp. in Oakville, Ont.

The knowledge that clients or potential clients gain by exploring your social media presence can, in turn, result in new business, as was evident by an example Dennis shared regarding a Manulife advisor.

Specifically, an advisor who was a part of Manulife’s pilot social media training program setup a detailed LinkedIn profile and was contacted by a client who was unaware of the advisor’s extensive qualifications. Learning that information convinced the client, who used various financial services institutions, to move an account worth more than $1 million to Manulife from another firm.

Some of the evidence is anecdotal, but Manulife also tracks advisors’ success with its social media program through a scorecard that measures factors such as user engagement and new dollars. Within the controlled pilot program that ran from May 2014 to April 2015, Dennis said the firm increased new assets under management by approximately $200 million through a combination of new business from current advisors and recruitment of new advisors.

Advisors and firms will find it difficult to determine that new business is a direct cause of social media, but they can consider whether the two are correlated, said Silu Modi, head of the social sales centre of excellence at Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada.

For example, advisors might want to see how many new clients they gained over the course of a year in which a connection was initially established through social media, he suggested.

But it’s not only advisors who can gain business through having active social media programs. Financial services firms can also bring in new business through their recruitment potential, Modi suggested.

“There are, thankfully, enough firms that don’t do social or digital [programs] or allow their people to [interact socially or digitally],” he said. “When it’s time for one of our firms to recruit, that’s something we can add to the package to entice them.”

Advisors want to have their own voice, and providing social media as a mechanism in which to do that is a compelling recruitment tool, he added.