Organizations of all sizes should encourage their employees to effectively utilize social media. In today’s financial services world, the powers that be are still trying to over control the messages. Instead, they need to find ambassadors within their own ranks to vastly expand their reach.
Two speakers touched on this topic at the 2016 Social Business Conference for Financial Services hosted by LIMRA and LOMA in Boston.
Consider Un-Marketing
In the opening keynote, Scott Stratten, a disruptive and un-traditional sales, marketing and branding expert, touched on a key marketing hurdle. He said that the narrative is created by the people who work for us. That is because people are more trusting of strangers than they are of brands.
Stratten further pointed out the harsh reality for organizations that try to do all their marketing using just the marketing team, stating, “The average reach for a Facebook brand page is two percent. Your industry might be worse.” Thus, the ivory tower approach to marketing is not always effective.
Stratten suggested asking your organization, “How does your end client want to interact with you?”
Activate Influencers
Amy McIlwain, the global industry principal for the financial services industry for Hootsuite, spoke about getting the word out via employees. Many firms now have a social CEO. Tim Hockey, president at TD Ameritrade, and Mark Casady, chairman and CEO at LPL Financial, were two executives that were noted as good examples. Still, sharing using social media is still not widespread within financial service firms.
“Social media is fundamentally changing the way we communicate,” said McIlwain. She believes social media is now the primary distribution of content and showed a statistic that social media accounts have now surpassed emails accounts.
Digital natives, those that have grown up with social networks in their lives, can share a message to a much larger audience in a more meaningful way. To take advantage of this potential, firms must build a social enterprise that goes beyond the marketing team and taps into all employees, especially the internal influencers. They might include those at the c-suite level, executive spokespeople, department heads and internal thought leaders.