Almost paradoxically, automation has also been highly successful for financial firms, according to Hearsay, especially for smaller firms and those little local marketing support. Automation can help lessen the burden of compliance.

Automated campaigns drove a high rate of engagement across the industry, 33% for wealth management firms.

So should advisors focus on the more hands-on, time-consuming effort of more personalized social media marketing, or embrace the efficiency of automation? Hearsay argues for a little bit of both: Automation plus a small amount of personalization – small modifications to suggested posts – doubled the rate of engagement over unmodified posts. Yet 93% of the automated posts Hearsay analyzed were unmodified.

Advisors new to social media should start on LinkedIn, said Shih.

“It’s more forgiving because you don’t have the strange, anonymous trolls you have on other networks,” she said.

Though the study did not cover the 2020 months when the market peaked, then bottomed out due to the Covid-19 crisis, nor the impact of coronavirus-caused shutdowns to the economy, Shih said that social media usage has become even more important since in-person, face-to-face and group interactions were rendered temporarily impossible.

“Hearsay has seen a surge in not just the amount of social media posting, but also the engagement back and click-through back to clients,” she said.

The study analyzed anonymized data from 54 major financial services firms across wealth management, property and casualty insurance, mortgage and life insurance industry segments, including 173,000 financial advisors who reached more than 77 million consumers, of whom 13.5 million consumers engaged back through December 2019. Interactions across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram were analyzed.
 

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