Few financial advisors (only 13 percent) have found new customers on social media, a new survey reveals, and only about a third (28 percent) say they use social media to promote their businesses, mostly in a limited fashion.
Still, a sizable majority of advisors polled (65 percent) say they are trying to or want to use this medium to find new clients.
SEI, a suburban Philadelphia firm that offers turnkey asset management services to RIAs, polled more than 200 advisors about the subject of social media at a July webinar and tried to find out why many advisors are slow to adopt it. About 25% of those polled said they are worried they couldn’t come up with frequent and relevant content, while 21 percent are worried about regulators. Some 15 percent simply don’t like the time and expense involved.
In another sign of how slowly the industry is adopting these tools, half of the respondents said that a LinkedIn profile was their sole social media outlet.
Surprisingly, there was a jump in the number of advisors who said they had no social media presence at all. Last year it was 19 percent, said SEI. This year, it’s 29 percent.
A spokesperson for the company said the unexpected numbers could be the result of a small sample size. The number polled in 2012 was about the same as this year’s.