When and How Should Financial Advisors Use Social Media?

Social Media. You know your clients are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (X), Instagram and perhaps a few places you haven’t heard of yet. You acknowledge there is value engaging in the social sphere, but you have not cracked the code on how and when to expend your energy to make this popular channel worth your while. How can a financial advisor engage without wasting time?

I want to share with you a combination of three ways to engage on social platforms that I continue to use to grow my business.

The time my team or I invest in these efforts returns exponentially in direct clients and opportunities that continue to amaze me.

By implementing all three frequencies I outline below, you will know where to spend your time and gain the most leverage out of your social media effort.

How to Invest Your Time in Social Media

#1: Daily

You’ve heard you should spend 10 or 15 minutes a day on social media to have an impact. While I don’t subscribe to this tactic as your only engagement since daily interaction is usually ‘reactive’ as you respond to what others post, you do want to allocate time each day to comment, share and participate in the social media ecosystem.

Examples:

• You congratulate a client on a recent promotion you read about on LinkedIn.
• You attend an industry conference, tweet a photo, and tag others in the shot.
• You comment on a post an divorce attorney shares on her firm’s Facebook page.
• You “retweet” and “favorite” an article published by a journalist you want to meet. Better yet, comment first!
• You read an article in your LinkedIn that is relevant for your audience and click share (include your one sentence opinion or commentary).

#2: Weekly

An effective advisor marketing plan starts with weekly content creation or curation aimed specifically at the concerns and aspirations of your high value hyper target client. This proactive sharing helps you establish authority and demonstrate that you understand your audience.

Whether your “home base marketing” is a blog, a video channel, or a podcast, you can expand your distribution when you push your message beyond the limited traffic of your website out to your social followers.

Share each new published post or episode on all of the social media platforms your clients (and, therefore, you) use. When you build this often overlooked act into your marketing system you open up the number of people who may view, like, share or act on your content.

Examples:

• Katie Brewer, CFP® publishes her latest blog post and shares with her Twitter followers.
• Jeff Rose, CFP® releases a new “Good Financial Cents” podcast and posts it on his Facebook page.
• Nichole Gardner and Timothy Gardner, CFP® post their latest Money Minute Video on their blog and on their youtube channel.

#3: Quarterly

Ripped from an advertising agency’s playbook, quarterly content campaigns allow you to share the story you want your audience to hear.

“Utilizing content campaigns is proactive brand storytelling on steroids.”

Here you carve out distinct time periods across the year where you focus your content each quarter on a single theme. Plan and set it up in advance to streamline the time you invest in the effort.

Here’s how:

• Decide on a hyper-specific topic to match the mindset of your high value hyper target. (e.g. 8 Steps Tech Exec Can Take to Craft Your ISO Selling Plan and Minimize Regret).
• Identify all of the content you already have that fits this topic (blog posts, newsletter articles, write-ups from a financial plan or client email excerpts)
• Draft the content you do not yet have but need to complete the story.
• Pinpoint the “holes” in your campaign. Find resources, articles, photos, or other professionals who can provide the content. Fill in any remaining blanks with your advice.
• Break down the content into posts for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or whichever platforms your audience uses.
• Set up and schedule the content distribution in advance through Meet Edgar or Buffer.
• Announce the campaign at the start of each quarter to let your followers, your prospect email list, and your clients know what to expect.

With a campaign each quarter, you can rest assured that if your daily interactions fall to every few days, your weekly sharing slips to semi-monthly, you have to deal with quarter end, or you want to take a holiday, a campaign focused on growing your practice will run in the background, keeping your brand top of mind.

Sounds like it’s worth making time for social media, right?

I only scratched the surface on social media campaigns in this post. If you want more detail on the quarterly campaign strategy, I outline step-by-step instructions in my free Beyond Likes, Connects and Follows social media guidebook, designed to advance your social media efforts and help you gain more traction. You may request your copy here.