“Advisors are posting things that their clients don’t want to see," Leonard noted. "They don’t want to be bludgeoned with economic data. They want the top ten golf courses.”

Of those using social networks, there is a huge separation in their peer group.  By tracking ROI, the giant bank is now trying to figure out if the effective use of social media is causal or correlative. “Ten percent of our advisors are covering ninety percent of our activity,” said Leonard.

One thing Wells Fargo is trying to do is focus on local listening.  How can they connect a prospective client to a local advisor?

Use Influencers To Expand Reach
Lindsay Tiles. managing director of corporate public relations at Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. talked about planned spontaneity. Her team prepares for the likelihood of certain topics so the content is ready to share in a timely manner.  For this reason, they put out commentaries very quickly.

Also, she recommends the content be social friendly. That means using videos in a more interactive way.

One struggle is getting the associates to be active on social media. “Even when we tell people what they can do, they don’t as they don’t want to make a mistake,” she admitted.

To reach a larger audience, Schwab’s strategy is to go after an influential group of media and bloggers. “Those people amplify our content. We go after a smaller group to go after a larger group,” she said.

Be In The Moment
Dan Greenberg, senior account executive of financial services at Twitter Inc., showed that mobile has doubled the time we spend online (highlighting and old chart from comScore from 2010 to 2013) without decreasing the time we spend on desktops. “Everything we think about has to be mobile first,” he said.

“We are not that far off from the tipping point when the wealth transfers to Gen X and Gen Y,” said Greenberg.

Twitter offers the ability to see what people are talking about in real time, he noted. Corporate entities have the ability to know what Twitter users are talking about when they are talking about it. This allows organizations to be able to personalize a brand and communicate when there is the most interest.