Humanize your brand. People want to deal with trusted financial experts. Social Media provides a great opportunity for you to humanize your brand.
Tag: CFP
Financial Advisor Social Media Best Practice – #Hashtags
Financial Advisors – Don’t forget to add #Hashtags to your social media posts. Hashtags are a searchable link. It makes your posts (content) discoverable and a great way to target client leads. Hashtags expand reach and amplify your content. I recommend 2-3 hashtags on Twitter & Facebook. LinkedIn up to 5 Hashtags. If you use too many Hashtags in a post it will look like SPAM (also makes you look desperate for attention). Social Media algorithms may mark it as spam if you add too many.
Curated a list of Hashtags according to your firms location (City, State), and specialty (Retirement, 401k, Estate Planning, Wealth Management, etc). A good way to see if the Hashtag is popular within the Financial Advisor community is to search for it first before you use it. Don’t overlook Hashtags as its a very important part of your Social Media marketing strategy!
Financial Advisors – Why you want to “Follow” back on Social Media
I get this question all the time from Financial Advisors. Why do I need to “follow” back people I don’t know on my Social Media platforms?
Answer: Because it makes these new followers feel good. New followers also may become a future client! Why do you want them to feel good? = RETWEETS and SHARES! You want them to feel good as they follow and read your original content (and random musings) on social media. Better yet, if they retweet or share the post it will “amplify” the content post reach.
Social Media post amplification can drive new visitors (prospective clients) back to your website and into the client funnel where they will ultimately fill out a contact form and generate a lead.
Financial Advisors – Social Media Reach
The number of active users on social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) continues to grow exponentially, making social media an increasingly attractive channel for financial advisors to not only reach prospective clients, but to nurture relationships with existing clients as well.
The use of Social Media in Financial Services organizations is no longer an option
The use of social media in financial services organizations is no longer an option. At the advisor level, Putnam Retail Management found 84% use social media for finance industry business. Ninety-two percent of them said social media has helped them gain new clients.
Create a LinkedIn Company Page and Target your Audience
LinkedIn company pages were created with the purpose of providing your business with point of contact information with your specific target audience.
The number of active users on platforms like LinkedIn continues to grow exponentially, making social media an increasingly attractive channel for financial advisors to not only reach prospective clients and centers of influence, but to nurture relationships with existing clients as well. LinkedIn is equally powerful when it comes to promotion: 80 percent of B2B leads come from here, proving to be the most effective channel.
Hootsuite has a great guide on “How to Use LinkedIn for Business: A Step-by-Step Guide for Marketers” and can be found here.
Once you set up your LinkedIn Company Page, your employees can help get the word out about its creation and existence. Get the employees to get involve & interact. “like” or share a post! What you want is to amplify your LinkedIn company original blog content, and company announcements. Finally, link your company website page over to your LinkedIn company page. Driving website traffic to and from the LinkedIn company page is a great way to attract potential clients!
Financial Advisor Social Media
As social media continues to increase with financial advisors usage – Advisors are using platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook company pages as a powerful tool in increasing traffic back to their respected website.
The number of active users on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, continues to grow exponentially, making social media an increasingly attractive channel for financial advisors to not only reach prospective clients and centers of influence, but to nurture relationships with existing clients as well.
A 2019 Putnam Social Advisor Survey of 1,021 financial advisors in the U.S. concluded that 98% of the advisors use social media for business or personal use. Some 83% use it for business. LinkedIn remained the dominant platform with a 72% business use. It was followed by Facebook at 62% and Twitter at 52%. Smaller platforms Instagram and Snapchat gained more traction, accounting for 38% and 22% of business use, respectively.
Now is a good time to start thinking about using Social Media to help grow your Financial Services brand, prospects, as well as website traffic.
SSL Certificate is a Must For Your Website
HTTPS is a way to encrypt information that you send between a browser and a web server. This protects your website’s users from “man-in-the-middle” attacks, where someone steals the information being sent to a website, like credit card information, logins, etc. An SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) is a set of data files that you can add to your server to achieve this encrypted connection between a browser and your server. Besides securing your website by way of encryption, it also helps with SEO (Google Rankings). Google has confirmed that HTTPS is a ranking signal. An unsecured website risks users’ online safety and could be hurting your SEO efforts. Google confirmed in 2014 that HTTPS is now a ranking signal. So, if your site doesn’t have SSL certificates and is on HTTPS, then now would a good time to update.
The Google post above is also a good read on how to decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate. Another bonus is that a SSL certificate increases customers trust (see my related past article here) and confidence in your website. Customer confidence is essential to increasing conversion rates.
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