But posts shouldn’t feel like advertising, lest they be dismissed as spam. “To the extent social media is beneficial to building a relationship with clients, it needs to feel ‘real,’” notes Charles Lewis Sizemore, a portfolio manager for Interactive Advisors and principal of Sizemore Capital Management in Dallas.
Individual Posting
To that end, he prefers postings that come from an individual advisor, as opposed to a corporate entity. “Would-be clients want to feel they have a relationship with a real, living and breathing human being,” he says.
Sizemore warns that information from “broker-dealer reps [that’s] been sanitized by compliance” won’t win many clicks. On the other hand, even though RIAs are “freer to express opinions than a B-D rep,” he says, they still need to be careful. “It’s OK to express opinions, and that’s what people want, but you don’t want to talk [about] your book [of business] to the point that you could be accused of market manipulation,” he cautions.
Still others hold that a semi-folksy approach can lend a certain charm. That could mean using “a few family photos [mixed with] actionable tips and reminders … and the pithy political insight or joke from time to time,” suggests Aaron Klein, CEO of Riskalyze, a financial data provider in Auburn, Calif., and Atlanta. “Authenticity is the name of the game.”
He says it’s important that advisors “be human and relatable,” but if an advisor is uncomfortable with social media, he or she should find other ways to communicate. “A stale and frigid Twitter account is worse than not having one at all,” says Klein.
And if you’re not comfortable with text, consider video. Jud Mackrill, chief marketing officer at the Carson Group in Omaha, Neb., favors clips shared on YouTube. Calling it “the second most powerful search engine out there”—after Google—he says that YouTube is also a good social media platform “for advisors to be educating and sharing information. … This is really where we see people gaining attention, building their own brand and engaging with people.”
Practice-Wide Branding
It’s not just individuals who should establish a presence online; an entire firm should also have its own cyber presence.
There are many ways of organizing a firm’s social media brand. Some practices discuss a topical message to highlight each week. “At our weekly team meetings, we establish that week’s social media content and what platforms we will be posting them to,” says Nina O’Neal, a partner at Archer Investment Management in Raleigh, N.C. “Advisors have their own social media posts but also share the company posts to boost outreach.”