According to a recent report released by Spectrem Group, social media networks have become an important stop for investment information for all age groups. Spectrem reports that 77% of investors who read blogs are likely to consult them for information on new financial products and services. Similarly, 69% of LinkedIn users are likely to consult their networks on the site about investment issues, and 63% of Twitter users would pay attention to investment tweets. Nearly half (46%) of YouTube users and 41% of Facebook users would seek investment information from these forums. Social media networks are also popular sources for developing new investment strategies and seeking buy/sell advice.
Using The New Technology
Advisors must set clearly stated social media goals. It's no different from any other business project. Write down the three main goals you hope to accomplish in using social media. Do you want to get referrals from other professionals? Are you networking with executives at a local company who all have the same deferred compensation plan? Are you targeting doctors in a particular specialty or who are in the same "megagroup"? Write down how you will accomplish these goals.
Now decide how you will accomplish your goals. Will you write a blog? Is Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn your primary medium? Each venue has its own strengths and benefits. You'll probably want to try each one and see which one you like best and which gets you the most engagement from others in your network. You can take advantage of tools that allow you to simultaneously post in more than one medium. Each medium also has its own tools allowing you to explore and build connections with the people most likely to help you-referral sources and potential clients. You'll need to set aside time weekly to do that research. Set a limit on the amount of time you will place on your social media activities-a minimum as well as a maximum. Social media will not be effective unless you work at it consistently.
But that also means you might want to delegate some of your online chores, because social networking can be time consuming. If you're updating your status and sending ideas through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, it can take 15 or 30 minutes a day to find and post a few good items your network is interested in. What you could do instead is delegate content creation-ask each person on your staff or a consultant to find three, five or ten articles a week relevant to your specialties to tweet. You can ask staff or a consultant to write a blog and post it.
But the research involved in building the network is probably not something you can delegate. You can't put a 21-year-old recent college graduate in charge of your LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter account, for instance, and expect her to find you the right connections. Only you know which of your high school buddies would now be a good person to make part of your network on Facebook. Only you know that, in your former career as a restaurant owner, you went to a convention for restaurateurs and met the owner of 17 Taco Bells who would be a good connection.
Be sure your social media goals are aligned with your firm's marketing strategy. Ask yourself if your profile pages on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook succinctly achieve your firm's marketing goals? Is the content of your blog useful to your target markets? Does your Web site's marketing content-your online brochure-speak to your target markets? Have you examined the keywords and phrases used on your Web site? Keywords are the terms people use in search engines to find you. Your Web site brochure text should repeatedly use the terms people are most likely to use when searching for information related to your expertise. You want the text on your Web site, blog, profile pages and status updates to mention these keywords frequently.
If you want to write a blog to help market your advisory firm, you'll need to do it at least once a week and preferably two or three times a week. It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours to write a single post, depending on how fast you write and how complicated your message is. A post should be about 200 words and no more than 600 words. It's short. If you hire a writer, you'll still need to set aside time to let her interview you. If you are a lousy writer, read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. If you're still a lousy writer or hate to do it, then try dictating a post and handing that off to a professional. If you are a gifted speaker, then find a cozy chair near a fireplace, add bright lighting, and video yourself speaking about topics of interest to your network-just two or three minutes each. Be sure to transcribe each video for search engines. Posting your blog to the Web-cutting and pasting it from Microsoft Word-should take no more than ten minutes and can be handed off to someone else.
If you are using wealth management content on your Web site from a company like mine, it's not helping you with search engines. Such content is important because your clients will go elsewhere to find it if you do not provide it and it works well in e-mail newsletters. But search engines don't give you any credit for content that's duplicated on multiple sites. If you want to create search-friendly content that will improve your search engine rankings, you must post articles unique to your site, targeted to your niches, and then tweet about them on Twitter and automatically pull them into Facebook and LinkedIn.
Instead of spending hundreds of dollars a month on search engine marketing-in a pay-per-click program such as Google AdWords-you may be better off writing content targeted to your ideal clients and making it search friendly. This is not easy, however. Why should you bother? Because such search-friendly content improves your search engine ranking naturally and the search engines will then help you find clients for free. Also, your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter updates are indexed by search engines. Google, which in June launched a new version of its search engine, says it now indexes hundreds of thousands of Web pages in parallel. "If this were a pile of paper, it would grow three miles taller every second," says Google.
Advisors can automate their social network posts, too. Facebook enables you to feed your blog posts to automatically update your wall. LinkedIn feeds your status updates into Twitter. Bit.ly (or Bitly.com) lets you tweet whenever you use its link-shortener. You can use such integrations to update several social media sites at once.