Social Media: Listening to clients

“Every advisor knows the game of community networking at the local Rotary club or joining the racquet ball club to keep up to date with their clients’ lives,” adds Milne. “Now, that has all evolved and we can be alerted by clients themselves when something big is happening in their lives – and we can be alerted right away.”

The prospect of earning a real return on investment from a social media presence now has advisors and their firms shifting gears from originally wanting to protect themselves on social media to wanting to see what their clients are doing on social media.

Third-party social media providers now offer online social media listening tools that can help you make sense of the torrent of client information available on social media websites, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Clients and prospects broadcast important events in their lives on a daily basis through social media websites, such as new jobs, engagements and births. There are countless status updates, postings or tweets of events in client’s lives that can cross your desk each and every day. These postings are useful pieces of information relevant your clients’ financial plans and can be identified as opportunities for you to get in touch with your clients – if you had the time to read them all.

You can log into a single portal that amalgamates all of a client’s social media accounts into a single news feed so that you need not monitor every social media website separately. These tools, driven by a keyword search or “signals,” will filter all status updates, postings or tweets of clients that you have identified as being selling opportunities.

You then are able to contact clients or prospects upon learning of their news. According to research by Socialware, clients are 40% more likely to buy from an advisor during a life event.

Let’s say a client proposes to his girlfriend. He may post a status update as follows: “She said, ‘Yes!'” You would be notified of this good news and thus have the opportunity to discuss financial planning issues related to marriage, such as buying life insurance or writing a will.

Being aware of clients’ life events being posted on social networks also represents an opportunity to strengthen your client relationships.

“It gives the advisor an opportunity,” says Milne, “to pick up the phone and make a connection.”

Social media users are much more conversational in online postings, says Clara Shih, CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Hearsay Social Inc., a social media marketing provider for financial and insurance advisors and real estate agents: “They aren’t going to simply post ‘I got engaged’ or ‘I am pregnant’.”

Shih co-founded Hearsay Social in 2009. Considered one of the newcomers in its industry, its platform offers advisors a social media marketing package. For a monthly fee, you will receive a social marketing platform (including training on how to set up a profile, what content to post and how to increase your connections), compliance monitoring to archive all material and a social media listening tool.

“In order to get the connections to yield meaningful leads,” Shih says, “we realize that advisors first need to build a social presence and be findable.”

Hearsay Social recently opened its first Canadian office in Toronto and has signed up two of the five major Canadian banks and two Canadian insurance companies.

“We are seeing a lot of traction in the Canadian market because Canada is the most social [media-using] country on the earth,” says Shih. “When you combine that with the strength of the Canadian financial services sector, it is a formula for success.”

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