Social Media for Financial Advisors: Tips for Success
For the savvy financial advisor, social media is a valuable tool that can help grow a business. According to a recent survey, four out of 10 financial advisors report they’ve found new clients through social media. To put it in terms you might use with a client — Investing your time in social media can pay off tremendously.
But the process isn’t as simple as creating a few accounts and gaining new clients immediately. A successful social media page requires behind-the-scenes strategy and advanced planning. Here are four tips for creating and sharing successful content on social media.
Know Your Audience and Platform
It sounds obvious, but in order to have success on social media, you have to first determine your audience. Are you targeting a younger clientele who’s looking to hire a financial advisor for the first time? Or are you looking to build engagement with existing clients who might be older? This will dictate both the style and content of your posts.
Another important variable to consider is not just the post’s target audience but where you’re creating and sharing the post. Each social media platform has a different audience, and the structure of the platform itself can inform what kinds of posts work best. Here’s a brief breakdown of some general trends and rules for a few of the major social media platforms:
- Audience: Millennials, Gen X, baby boomers; professionals
- Content: Long-form content; core values and existing client engagement
- Weakness: Not a place for reaching new, younger users
- Audience: millennials and baby boomers
- Content: News about your firm; links to external articles of interest; advertising to new clients
- Weakness: Poor organic reach without paid advertising
X (formerly Twitter)
- Audience: Millennials and Gen X
- Content: Links to relevant news items and discussion
- Weakness: Small ad audience
- Audience: Millennials and Gen X
- Weakness: High ad costs; dominance of e-commerce on the platform
TikTok
- Audience: Gen Z and younger millennials
- Content: Short-form videos for financial advice
- Weakness: Unlikely to reach existing clients (this could also be a strength!)
Set Clear Goals
It’s important to think logically about your social media strategy — not just what you are posting but why you are posting it. Consider these examples:
- Your posts on TikTok might be designed to raise brand awareness among the younger generation, even if they’re not quite ready to become a client just yet
- Your posts on Facebook might be geared toward finding new clients
- Your posts on LinkedIn might be about staying engaged with your current clients
Whatever your strategy, it’s important to state it outright and create clear benchmarks so that you can monitor your success and adjust accordingly.
Include a Call to Action
As a general rule, all social media posts should include a call to action (CTA) — a prompt for the post’s audience to follow. What this call to action might look like will, once again, depend on the goal of the post. If the goal is to find new clients, you might ask the audience to “contact us today for a free consultation.” If the goal is to build brand awareness with a new audience, you might ask them to follow your social media pages. No matter the case, the call to action ideally turns the post from words (or video) into action, which you can track.
Create a Content Calendar
Instead of posting on different platforms when the mood strikes, consider building out a dedicated content calendar that outlines when to post on each specific platform. The advantage of a content calendar is that it can be optimized for when your different audiences are most active on various platforms, giving you the best shot at engaging them. In addition, a content calendar might contain specific genres of posts on a given day. For example, short videos, infographics, polls, webinar invites, or interactive PDFs. This can help ensure you’re creating new content on a regular basis.
There’s a lot more that goes into social media strategy than it might seem from the outside. But the good news is that by keeping these few simple principles in mind, you can build a successful brand identity and strong social media presence and, most importantly, reap the benefits of an engaged, growing clientele!