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:

  • Kids and money
  • Travel
  • Millennials and money
  • Healthy living
  • Technology

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.