Social Media for Financial Planners

Are you wondering how Social Media Marketing can help you, as a Financial Planner, to connect with your prospective customers and keep your clients engaged?

With over 80% of Australians now using the internet, and some 62% of these using social networking sites, Social Media marketing is now an essential part of B2B and B2C marketing mix. 

With 36% of connected Australians using social networking at least every day, and 10% using it more than 5 times a day (Source: Yellow Social Media Report, June 2012, Sensis), it would be remiss of any business to exclude it from their marketing strategy. 

How can Social Media help a Financial Planning firm? As a Financial Planner, your businesses is based on building trusted relationships with your clients.  Social media enables you to engage your clients and cultivate your relationships even more effectively. If you are not connecting with your prospects and clients on-line, someone else soon will be.  Social Media is the ultimate word-of-mouth platform, giving you access to referrals you may otherwise not have access to. 

Are Facebook and Twitter really the platforms we should be focussing on?  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn are the most utilised Social Media platforms in Australia in 2012.  As a starting point, it is recommended that a combination of these be used to market you business.  

Additionally, Financial Planners can benefit greatly from regularly providing webinars, focusing on topics which will educate and generate interest in an information-hungry on-line audience.  The provision of free information is a brilliant way to capture the attention of new prospects, and keep your business at the forefront of existing clients minds.   Regular interactions with your Social Media audience, in order to gauge the response to topics, is an invaluable way to ensure you are providing a targeted webinar.

Webinars can be marketed using an email marketing campaign, specially designed with a call to action to preview the webinar introduction and register for participation. Using LinkedIn to market upcoming webinars is another way to build your prospective client database. Careful selection of the right groups on LinkedIn gives you a relevant audience to whom you can send webinar updates. YouTube is another brilliant platform for marketing your webinars.  Uploading a short "teaser" video to your channel, detailing the page main theme and some.  

Podcasts can be used to another way to compliment your webinar program.  Pre or post webinar, these are a great way keep your audience engaged or build interest in future webinar events. 

Last, but certainly not least, Social Media Marketing is a must for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) purposes, particularly since the 2011 and 2012 Google algorithm updates (named Penguin and Panda).  Social Media had leaped to prominence as an important factor in SEO.  Making sure your social media channels are fully optimised with important links back to your website, and keeping your Social Media sites alive with fresh content and audience engagement, will maximise you chance of achieving and maintaining page one results.