So how do you listen? Start by making a list of your clients’ (and any high-value prospective clients’) social media profiles, and then follow them. You might also want to identify popular hashtags relevant to your business, such as #401k or #currencies. Applications like HootSuite and TweetDeck enable you to create streaming lists that organize your contacts into categories and view their tweets and Facebook posts in real-time.
There are also a number of paid monitoring services like Radian6 that scour the entire spectrum of social media for company mentions or important keywords, and package all relevant conversations in a convenient report.
Collect news and market intelligence. The number one way financial professionals in our survey use social media is to collect news and information. Almost every traditional news outlet now has a Twitter account, and it’s not uncommon for them to break news on Twitter first. Of course, reacting to news from social media requires an extra degree of caution – a case in point is the recent hack of the Associated Press’ Twitter account, which resulted in a 143-point fall in the Dow.
News gathering is a useful – and basic – function of social media. But savvier users in financial services are tuning into broader conversations and gleaning valuable market insights. With new SEC guidelines permitting public companies to disclose corporate developments through social media, there are now more conversations relevant to the financial community taking place than ever before.
How are your peers collecting this intelligence? There are a variety of tools and techniques that you can use to get at trends and insights. It’s not as simple as following the top news outlets or financial pundits, though that’s a good place to start. Specialized searches and monitoring and analytical tools can help track buzz and identify emerging market trends and new pockets of investor demand while filtering out irrelevant information.
Paid monitoring services can help you monitor what individuals and companies are saying on social media channels about their industry, their competitors, the market in general and the sentiment with which they express these thoughts. Also consider joining StockTwits, a financial communications platform that allows you to easily track financial data and analysis around company tickers (demarcated on Twitter as $TICKER).
Navigate compliance. Compliance concerns may be the biggest barrier to social media engagement in the financial services world. Though the SEC has issued more guidelines of late, there’s no clear-cut manual that explains the DOs and DON’Ts.
If you don’t already, make sure you have an approval mechanism in place for any social media content. Depending on the size of your firm, you may want to appoint just a few individuals to post content on the company’s behalf or about the company until you’ve educated the rest of your colleagues. Before rolling out social media to the entire firm, develop guidelines that outline exactly what is and what is not permitted and detail the approval process.
To prevent a backlog of content, you can use a social media management platform to cue up and schedule posts in advance. As soon as you have approval, you can release your posts with the click of a button.
It certainly isn’t easy to sort through the clutter when getting started with social media, but it is clear that there are significant advantages to be gained. As with any new technology, it’s important to temper enthusiastic participation with thorough research and good judgment. Now that social media has proved itself no passing fad, we’re at the stage where it’s no longer a question of will you participate but how. Don’t get left behind!