To become more effective social media marketers, advisors should embrace tools that allow them to automate the delivery of content, according to a recent report, but they also need to take a more personal touch.

Clients and prospects aren’t just engaging with any content, according to Hearsay Systems' third annual Financial Services Social Media Content Study, which said authentic, personal content created by an advisor drives 10 times more engagement than corporate marketing content. Audiences are also more likely to engage with personal narratives than they are content created for financial education.

“There was, before, a fallacy that technology initiatives had to be all human or all digital, but investors want and expect both, especially now during the pandemic,” said Clara Shih, CEO and founder of Hearsay Systems, a San Francisco-based digital marketing firm for the financail services industry.

Effective social media marketing should generate clicks, using posts to extend the reach of advisors and drive more and deeper engagement with clients and prospects, according to Hearsay, which broke social media content into five categories: general lifestyle, financial education, corporate brand, corporate/product promotion and corporate lifestyle.

Yet most of the content posted to social media by the wealth management industry has not been personal in nature, but corporate/product promotion, usually containing messages about why a product or strategy might be timely or a bad idea.

Shih said that consumers are also not engaging with financial education content as much as advisors might believe that they do.

“A lot of advisors make the mistake of just posting about financial topics, here’s a market update, what stocks did today, or an economic outlook – that’s not the only thing that clients want to hear about,” said Shih. “They want ot hear about how you’re helping in your community, maybe about how you volunteered at a food bank during the pandemic. They want a webcast from a public health expert your firm hired about how to take care of your health. They want to learn about cybersecurity issues and how to protect themselves from theft or fraud.”

The lifestyle categories, general, which includes holiday posts, health and personal interest, and corporate, which includes corporate philanthropy, volunteerism and culture posts, were among the least published in Hearsay’s analysis. These lifestyle categories also drove the most audience engagement, which corporate/product promotion posts drove the least audience engagement..

To create effective personal content, an advisor must know intimately the communities in which they’re trying to work, not just in geographic terms, but also across social, cultural and demographic attributes. For example, advisors in the San Francisco Bay area suffer if they don’t highlight that they work with employees in the technology sector, said Shih.

Personal content should also be authentic to the advisor’s persona, and relevant to their audience’s concerns and needs.

Shih said that can be accomplished by staying engaged with clients, especially on social media, where they are likely to discuss major life events, enabling advisors to engage in what she calls social selling.

“Job changes, people moving, having a baby, buying a house – all of these are life changing events and trigger moments for financial advice,” she said. “We find ways to help advisors and relationship managers hear what’s happening on their networks – that’s the ‘hear’ part of our name.”

Shih added that advisors should always “listen before they post” on social media, the rough equivalent to taking measure of a room before deciding which behavior and conversational topics are most appropriate.

Advisors can still go a long way without highly detailed customization – generic posts about lifestyle topics like holidays and personal health performed very well for wealth managers. Hence, last year, wealth management firms increased their lifestyle content on social media from 15% of all social media content in 2018 to 25% in 2019.

But it’s also important that advisors are posting from their own accounts and not just from social media accounts representing business or brand. Shih said that a comparison of posts of the same content placed on a corporate account and on advisors' personal/professional accounts found that the posts on advisors' individual accounts generated 40 times the engagement of the corporate posts.

“It reflects the power of the personal relationships that exist between advisors and clients,” said Shih. “There’s so much noise thrown at all of us, a really powerful way for us to filter the noise is to go through people that we trust.”

Advisors have to recognize that fewer people go to the yellow pages when they need help. After asking for referrals from family and friends, consumers seeking financial advice are likely to turn to social media and internet searches, and will tend to focus more on online reviews than corporate communications like websites.

The most popular content categories in 2019 among Hearsay’s Content Campaigns, which automatically provide weekly content to clients and prospects from trusted sources, were mostly focused around lifestyle issues:

The most encountered word across all of the posts Hearsay analyzed was "help." The most effective keywords, according to Hearsay, include financial, retirement, tax, money and advisor.

Advisors should still be careful about personalization, as some organizations and companies may balk at personal content on social media accounts associated with their brands, and some firms’ compliance regimes might delay advisors’ ability to post timely personal content.

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.